


cui bono?

by ars_belli



Category: Masters of Rome - Colleen McCullough, Thursday Next - Jasper Fforde
Genre: Alternate History, Footnotes, Gen, Wordcount: 30.000-50.000, Yuletide 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 23:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_belli/pseuds/ars_belli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the central characters of the Masters of Rome series decide to forgo historical accuracy to venture into alternate history, there's only one person for Jurisfiction to call.  However, even Thursday may not be a match for Caesar's stubbornness, charm, or infection with Mary Sue virus.  Can Thursday co-operate with an old enemy to save the series from the DanverClones, or will the boxed set be history?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChristyCorr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChristyCorr/gifts).



>   * Text Grand Central issues its utmost apologies for the delay in the prototype UltraWord replacement. In lieu of the new super-heavy throughput engine BOOK VIII ("Maus"), this story is issued in the stable OS BOOK VI Ausf. E ("Tiger").
>   * In compliance with new SO-3 Dimensional Equality Regulations, SO-3 claims no responsibility for the existence of a Colleen McCullough (or indeed a Thursday Next, Phoebe Smalls or any other persons extant in this dimension) in the reader's own dimension.
>   * The ImaginoTransference medium of choice to convey material from the Well of Lost Plots to the Outland Author was Marx and Spenser's Empress Grey Tea (with lemon, not milk; nor to be confused with their upcoming _Das Fairie Kapital_ ).
>   * Funds for research booksploration were generously loaned by ~~Brutus et Brutus~~ Metius et Scapetus, who wish to take this opportunity to remind Gaius Julius Caesar that his re-negotiation of the loan terms from forty-eight percent compound to ten percent simple interest on behalf of the author is earning them no money whatsoever.
>   * Maps of the BookWorld, courtesy of Colonel Trafford Bradshaw, permitted the recreational booksploration of ISBNs 978-1447223863, 978-1447223887, 978-1447223924 and 978-1447223931 during the creation of this work.
> 


When this month's copy of _Movable Type_ landed in my Jurisfiction in-tray, I paid it no heed. Emperor Zhark presided over the cover in his usual black garb and the headline  JURISFICTION CRISIS AT INTERNAL PLOT REVOLT was probably just Text Grand Central's salvo in the eternal struggle between police and politicians. I chucked it into the IN/OUT box and returned to writing up my report on the Dark Reading Matter fiasco. I had forgotten that in the BookWorld—unlike the Outland— _nothing_ happened without narrative imperative.

"Bun, Thursday?"  
Tiggy-Winkle extended a paw holding a box of neatly-iced tea cakes. I hadn't been hungry at all until the smell of cinnamon and sugar wafted from the box.  
"Of course. Who refuses an offer of food from the Paragon Tea Rooms?"  
Biting into the bun sent icing everywhere. I grabbed _Movable Type_ to use as a makeshift plate and brushed crumbs off my report.  
"You've read it, then?" asked Tiggy-Winkle.  
Her spines flared.  
"N-no," I mumbled around a mouthful of bun.  
"This is precisely the sort of case Miss Havisham would have relished! Complex negotiations, multiple smoothers to fix the plot adjustment, giving a few men a richly deserved 'what-for'…"  
I inspected the cover more closely. The scenery around His Imperial Mercilessness reminded me of the Sheldonian Theatre back home, from the airy cream walls and finely painted ceiling murals to the togate figures milling about and copious quantities of blood on the floor.   Cover story p.5 - Cast of Historical Box Set invent own plots - Jurisfiction admits difficulties not seen since _Lord Jim_ and _Shadow The Sheepdog_   read the byline. Well, "box set" ruled out Graves's tome "I, Caesarion" given the dismal failures of both the sequel "Octavian the Triumvir" and the prequel "Antony the Dictator."  
"… and can you imagine assigning my protégé to the case Thursday? Bradshaw may as well have asked me to do it!"  
"A giant hedgehog incognito in the _Forum Romanum_? You'd manage better in Alexandria." I quipped.  
"And Zhark didn't stand out in the first century BC?" she countered.  
"You have a point. Speak of the devil!"  
His Imperial Mercilessness walked in sporting an array of very un-Imperial bruises and cuts. He collapsed into the spare chair opposite my desk and pinched my bun.  
"Attacked by a tribune of the plebs?" I asked.  
Shaking his head, Zhark munched gloomily. All Jurisfiction officers were well-versed in the signs of an impending, Imperial tantrum. Gesturing with the magazine, I adopted a cheerful tone. No Thraals were going to be enslaved as a panacea on my account.  
"I was just saying to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle that you must have the diplomatic skills to nail this mission."  
The hedgehog took her cue and offered Zhark another bun.  
"Diplomacy is all very well, but one has to get to the negotiating table first. I tried the subtle approach, going to see Caesar in private in his _insula_ in the Subura—it's his plot divergence after all!—and intending to get him on my side before official talks started," he grumbled, "You know, a friendly chat, tyrant-to-tyrant."  
"What did you say to piss him off?" we chorused.  
"Nothing! Well…in my defence I had the best of intentions."  
"Just like when you blew up that planet in your latest book?" I interrupted.  
"That was perfectly legitimate! Murdering the rebels on it was a perfectly justifiable pre-emptive strike before they started using their Earth-Shattering-Kaboom-Laser on _my_ planets. Had it not been for those dratted Rhambosians—"  
"—Oh, get on with it," sighed Tiggy-Winkle.  
"Where was I? Oh yes, Caesar. He implied that Jurisfiction was powerless to stop events if his fellow generics really got out of hand, to which I replied 'I'll show you my siege artillery if you show me yours,' and he got very offended and started ranting about somewhere called Bithynia."  
"And whacked you about a bit?"  
"Not at all," moaned Zhark, "His mistress Servilia turned up and added to the cacophony by shouting that she didn't care how many other women Caesar was fucking, but if I was his other man then both he and I could bugger off to Athens. Then she chucked a vase at me!"  
"Shame," I gasped, trying not to snigger.  
"Yes, I'll bet she broke a splendidly-described piece of Egyptian glassware," added the hedgehog.  
We found ourselves on the receiving end of a glare that had undoubtedly quelled many a rebellious star system.  
"What happened next?"  
"Caesar made some very hasty explanations while dodging more improvised missiles and advised me to make a tactical withdrawal. I did precisely that. The last thing I saw, the pair of them are probably still, ah, engaging in close-quarters reconnaissance."  
"I can just imagine how Miss Havisham would have responded to _that_ ," I sputtered, trying desperately to keep a straight face.

I took a bun to replace the one Zhark had scoffed and flicked to the fifth page of the magazine. Even _Movable Type_ had trouble putting a cheery spin on the events.  
"'Jurisfiction's finest'—nicely-starched collar in that photo, your Imperial Majesty—'have seen their latest fiction infraction explode into a full-scale revolt…,' blah, blah, '…all A-class generics in _The October Horse_ are on permanent strike and threatening military action…' Look, Bradshaw issued a Lampshade Notice!" I exclaimed, "Must be hell on the ImaginoTransference Engines."  
"And even more on the poor sod who has to fill out the paperwork for the L-notice. TGC hate them even more than the Emergency Snooze," complained Zhark.  
"But it pretty much is an Emergency Snooze, right?" I asked.  
"Not quite: the L-notice requires us to Snooze _every page_ after the plot divergence and tell the reader 'Hello, this is a plot hole. Don't worry about reading the plot hole, flick back to that page you've forgotten,' _ad nauseam_ so continually the readers set themselves back another hundred pages. At least in a box set we can send them to another volume entirely," explained the hedgehog.  
"When was the last time we had one of those? I don't remember any," I commented absently.  
"Since…"  
Zhark trailed off. I glanced up from the magazine. He was eying me with the sort of look which he usually directed at newly-built, this-time-guaranteed-impregnable battle stations.  
"Since _Shadow the Sheepdog_ ," he finished slowly.  
"No. Oh, no, I am officially semi-retired. Besides, I can't even book jump anymore!" I spluttered.  
"We'll give you a taxi fund," offered Zhark.  
"Yes, but this is not really my field of expertise. I only read Latin for a year as an undergraduate. Under protest, in fact."  
"So you know the history?"  
"Well, yes. Sort of. Only the famous bits," I hedged.  
"Better than me! And you must know the language?"  
"Now, hang on, I can read it, but not speak it. Besides, most educated Romans spoke in Greek--"  
"How is your Greek?"  
Finally I saw my way out.  
"Atrocious. Can't even write the alphabet."  
"We'll give you an apprentice then."  
"With Latin and Greek? Oration skills good enough to pass as a senator?" I haggled.  
"An undercover approach, I like the sound of that!" added Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.  
"See, perfect for the job. A strong female character with plenty of experience is just the sort of Jurisfiction agent we need on this case," encouraged Zhark.  
"The only strong female character in my Latin classes was Dido—and look how much notice Aeneas took of her!" I countered.  
"Giving up already?"  
I shoved my fingers through my hair and rested my elbows against the desk.  
"Look, guys, I would love to help. I really would, but I…"  
Suddenly facing Goliath all over again was an appealing prospect. A sip of coffee had no effect on my constricted throat whatsoever.  
"…I'm _getting old_. I can't keep up the pace kicking butt all over the BookWorld. Give me a weekend off and a copy of Kennedy's Latin Primer and I'll do what I can to help on Monday. When I've rested."  
"We don't have a weekend, old girl."  
I hadn't seen Commander Bradshaw so concerned since UltraWord. He nodded towards the article. I skimmed hastily without translating the  Courier Bold, wondering what else I had missed while in the Dark Reading Matter.  
"On a more positive note, Jurisfiction have managed to halt the spread of contagion to the previous five volumes, a vital victory in saving the sprawling historical epic _Masters of Rome_ from complete erasure by the Council of Genres. They wouldn't!"  
Commander Bradshaw removed his safari hat, wiping sweat from his brow with a banana-patterned handkerchief embroidered 'Melanie'.  
"I've just come directly from the Council of Genres. Their case is that the ImaginoTransference Engines aren't built for long-term lampshading—which is true—but Jobsworth is too canny to admit straight out that this whole business is a hideous expense. Another week and the best we'll be able to do is argue to shuttle the whole boxed set over to Alternate History. A new eye on the case will perhaps buy us a bit more time, at least to present Jobsworth with a new plan of attack and a new set of potential smoothers. At the moment the only thing preventing TGC from eraserheading every generic in the last book is the sheer scale involved."  
"Every one? What, even the D-classes?"  
The magazine slid from my hands onto the desk. All that work we had done saving the BookWorld from Goliath, only to find that their profit over principles approach was thriving even in fiction.  
"Especially the D-classes. There must be at least twenty Roman legions in the series, most of which are generalled by, what, three A-class generics? Gaius Julius Caesar is up to his neck in something very rum about plot divergences. At least one book connects the younger Caesar to the other great generals, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix—who have their differences in that volume, admittedly—but if the elder version of young Caesar should manage to booksplore into the very first volume, in which Marius and Sulla are allies…"  
"They would have serious negotiating power," finished Zhark. "Unless we get sci-fi involved, but historically-inaccurate response teams have been _strictly_ banned ever since that _Illium/Olympus_ debacle."  
Dan Simmons's account of the Trojan War had had its versions of Homer's original characters injected with quantum nanobots to prevent the fragile Anglicisms from infection by the mispeling vyrus. Unfortunately the vaccine had used a live strain of _physicus quantum populariusque_ which had mutated into _cacat technobabblius_. Within a week the book and its successor had had to be permanently quarantined behind the hard sci-fi event horizon. According to observers, transmissions of historical accuracy were infinitely read-shifted upon entry into the horizon, never to be seen again.  
"There's nothing enough DanverClones can't handle," I murmured. "What a waste."  
"You don't have to save the world in a day, Thursday."  
I sighed. So much for a quiet bit of R &R after defeating Goliath's incursion into the Dark Reading Matter.  
"No, just seven of them."  
"That's the spirit old girl!"1  
I hastily swept a packet of Diazuperol and my remaining ammo clips from my desk into my bag, where they joined my spare automatic, three pencils, the bullet-damaged copy of _Jane Eyre_ , my TravelBook, Mycroft's endlessly-replenishing coffee thermos and a can of Moggilicious for the Cheshire cat.2   Bradshaw handed me the cane, which I leaned on too heavily for my liking.3  
"We'll pick up your translator on the way, shall we?" prodded Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.4   "Although judging by the Footnoterphone, you don't need one."  
I tried not to think about managing a real conversation as we wandered outside. A familiar yellow TransGenre Taxi materialised straight into the footman.5  
"Don't worry, he likes being too insignificant to be noticed," murmured Bradshaw.  
He held open the rear door for me and we all piled in.  
"Where to?" enquired the cabbie.  
"The Great Library, under 'McCullough.' Quick as you can, please."  
"Still trying to sort out that 'Masters of Rome' stuff, are you? Better you than me!"  
With a snigger, we were off.

I was in a long, dark, wood-panelled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterned with geometric designs and the ceiling was decorated with sculpted reliefs that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. Running down the centre of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor vanished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important.6 My entourage headed straight for the lift to the thirteenth floor.  
"Let me get this straight," I said.  
The lift began its laborious descent from the 'Z' floor which housed the Council of Genres. I started ticking off points on my fingers.  
"Maintenance requirements include an exchange program for all historical novels to non-fiction, to ensure that the generics remain somewhat true to their historical counterparts. The first five volumes visited an English translation of Mommsen's _Römische Geschichte_ 7  without a problem. Then the cast of _The October Horse_ were accidentally sent to the unfinished volume 8 on the Roman Empire. They conceived some very strange ideas that would ordinarily fizzle out. Unfortunately, the forceful personalities who were most affected by the translation then used the numerous oratory passages in the book to convert most of the soldiery and large sections of the Plebeian Assembly. Only the ongoing squabbles between the _boni_ and Caesarian factions in the Senate are preventing the conversion of the patricians as well. Worse, the last three volumes share a lot of leading characters and the contagion has the potential to spread throughout the series." 9  
The lift ponderously made its way from 'E' to 'D' while we waited. Zhark picked an imaginary crumb off his immaculate robes. Bradshaw adjusted his safari hat. The indicator dinged through 'B'.  
"Best of luck!" my fellows carolled.  
I nodded, doing my best to prevent my intestines from strangling my windpipe. Saving the BookWorld was one thing; dealing with all of the complex grey areas in such a huge assignment was quite another. Still staring at the indicator, I caught only a flash of grey coat in my peripheral vision as the cage lift arrived. The only other occupant shoved open the door and ushered me into the confines of the lift.  
"Miss Next! I look forward to working with you again."  
The tall figure grinned at my apparent astonishment.  
" _Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit_ ,10 I assume?" I managed. "Hello Hades."  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  1Cat! We need a junior for Thursday.
> 
>   
> 2 _Oh Señor Don Gato was a cat,/On a high red roof Don Gato sat./He went there to read a letter,/Meow, meow, meow/Where the reading light was better,/Meow, meow, meow/T'was a love note for Don Gato. …_ — Yes, yes Latin _and_ Greek, senatorial fluency…anything else Thursday?
> 
>   
>  3Salve feles! I can be the sweet voice of reason, but I need someone to watch my back. Someone who won't take any shit from a lictor—or their magistrate—but not trigger-happy either. The last thing we need is another Thursday1-4 shooting before asking questions. Tibi gratio!
> 
>   
> 4 _…"I adore you," wrote the lady cat./Who was fluffy, white, and nice and fat./There was not a sweeter kitty/Meow, meow, meow/In the country or the city/Meow, meow, meow…_ So you can play 'good urban prefect, bad urban prefect'? Looks like I need another you, only male and younger. Don't want much, do you? Mind you, for a can of Moggilicious I can pull strings over in non-fiction too. How did you end up taking Latin anyway?
> 
>   
> 5 _Long_ story. I had an English lecturer at university who maintained that we could never appreciate our own literature while ignorant of the contribution of the ancients. I could hardly refuse to take Latin -- and at least I got out of taking Greek. I dropped my elective when he was fired.
> 
>   
>  6Fforde, Jasper (2004); Lost in a Good Book Chapter 15 _Curiouser & Curiouser in Osaka_; Penguin Books
> 
>   
> 7Mommsen, Theodor (1854-1856); Römische Geschichte, volumes I-III; Leipzig: Reimer & Hirsel
> 
>   
> 8Mommsen, Theodor (1885); Römische Geschichte volume V _Die Provinzen von Caesar bis Diokletian_ ; Berlin: Weidmann
> 
>   
> 9The cavalry is here! Go straight up.
> 
>   
> 10Hades, Acheron (1954); Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit; Berlin: Springer-Verlag


	2. Chapter 2

"The Cat has a strange definition of the phrase 'previous work experience' if it gave me _you_."  
"Oh, positively _perverse_ I dare say. But what does one expect from Lewis Carroll?"  
I didn't have to look at him to feel the smile.  
"Tut, tut, Thursday. So ungracious? Ought I have appeared in toga and civic crown to gain your approval?"  
"Provided I didn't have to watch you getting into it."  
The usual ill-ease generated by the presence of multiple occupants in the one confined elevator would have been very welcome. Instead I consoled myself with the possibility that some other unfortunate would enter the lift, sparing me the focus of Hades's cloying presence. No, that would be worse, for this Hades (were he anything like the original) would gleefully take the opportunity to invade my personal space. Ten floors to go. I produced an approximation of definitely-not-a-sigh and shifted my weight as an excuse.  
"Did I inflict that?" Hades asked idly.  
"No," I snapped.  
"My condolences. I would have generated so little damage for the same level of pain."  
"Somehow your wistful tone does not tug at my heartstrings."  
"Then I'll find some other method to do so."  
"As long as it isn't flensing. You'll end up with a terrible steam cleaning bill with all that blood."  
"Cold water, actually," he replied absently.  
Doubtless his mental wattage was mostly involved in casting a lascivious eye over his adversary.  
"What?"  
"The beginner's error Thursday. Such confidence that the blood will vanish, all the while steaming it nicely into the carpet for forensics."  
The thirteenth floor saved me from inventing a snappy response to _that_. We even had a welcoming committee. I limped from the lift, holding out my hand and ignoring the posse of D-class generics surrounding the centre of attention.  
"Senator Jobsworth, I am so gratified at your concern," I uttered in the tone I reserved for Lydia Startright interviews.  
"Ah, Thursday!"  
The white-robed bureaucrat peered at me.  
"You are the real Thursday, aren't you?" he added.  
"Absolutely," I assured him, "Commander Bradshaw postponed my official retirement specifically for this case."  
"Making progress, are you?"  
"I have already interviewed two experienced Jurisfiction personnel on progress to date. We are now moving our enquiries directly to the source material."  
"Really? So soon after we had such trouble with invasion from the Outland?"  
The senator's dubious gaze wandered over my cane, my looser-than-usual clothes for minimal discomfort and my uneven stance.  
"While not in peak form, I am more than capable of making a not-insignificant contribution to the group effort Jurisfiction is making to solve this dilemma."  
"I see. Well, I hope that you resolve the matter in the most efficient way possible."  
So saying, he swept into the lift, the entourage squeezing in with difficulty.  
  
"'Most efficient way possible'", I muttered, " _Pig_."  
"Sociable sort of chap," Hades remarked sardonically. "Could you have been less specific?"  
I started down the hallway. The fact that Jobsworth himself had come to inspect the book did not bode well for its lifetime.  
"I refuse to give him any more ammunition than necessary."  
"An intriguing slip of the tongue Thursday!"  
One which had inadvertently pleased him? Words had always been a weapon to the real Hades: every promise a curse, a simple sentence an elegantly-spun trap. The artistry had fascinated me, even as I had learned its distillation. How many times had the field of battle been the starched expanse of tablecloth at some expensive London restaurant, too cautious to meet in Swindon? An opening salvo of Caesar's concise prose; a pretty confection of an entrée mirrored by a snatch of Horace; the main course winding along the endless constructions of Ciceronian metaphor; dessert flavoured by the poison-tipped barbs of Catullus. So many years afterwards, the crackling heat of a fire and the burn of brandy on my throat and the comforting smell of a leather armchair still carried with it the dark tangles of Vergilian epic. But I had survived the Underworld and passed into the upper air through the gate of horn, turning away from the ivory of Hades's false promises. Had his death not proved that, nor any of the other countless choices I had made? Not even the simplest of them all: an unadorned question, _Come with me_ , Acheron had said, and an equally plain refusal. The written Hades broke into my musings.  
"What does he gain from seeing the series destroyed? He's a bureaucrat, not some tribesman with a grudge from Transalpine Gaul. Mind you, he may very well be! Does he ever admit which book created him?"  
"I have ten quid on 'Poorly-characterised Westminster drama' in the Jurisfiction office sweep."

As we continued down the corridor, the comforting hum of story from the surrounding volumes was more relief than any number of Diazuperol patches. I felt as young as I had when I first fell into the Library: more energetic and resilient, true, but also just as overwhelmed by the creative spark which imbued the air. Reading _Robinson Crusoe_ without finding a stray coconut on my pillow afterwards had been a disconcertingly second-hand experience, characters and scenes spun from the fragile glass of imagination instead of the robust texture of experience. For weeks I had been an opium addict resorting to chewing poppy seeds. Now I had the strength to let loose my mind into the opulent den of a richly-described historical fiction. Even my new subordinate (I refused to submit to the idea that he was my partner) cast as much shadow on my mood as he did on the nearby shelves. But good humour or not, I had a case to solve.  
"Nothing as straight-forward as revenge. Sending the DanverClones in is a quick way of ensuring that we salvage five of the six volumes instead of risking all of them to save the last."  
"Do we have any reliable intelligence?"  
I would rather have endured a candle-lighted supper with Jack Schitt than admit to Hades how bereft of information I was, let alone a coherent plan.  
"First I want to form my own opinion by examining the book directly. We ought to be able to enter the scene before the infraction and see events up close. Then we can see how our colleagues have fared with the various characters and proceed from there."  
"In that case, I leave myself in your capable hands, Thursday."  
I would treat Hades like a normal Jurisfiction cadet, I decided, even if I had been slow off the mark establishing the usual rules. (The fact that 'Ma'am' was not an optional mode of address would be number one.) He volunteered nothing further, so we lapsed into a silence which, by nature (or the design of the Great Panjandrum), was by definition comforting. The sound of our footsteps drowned in the heavy carpet. Even my leg throbbed less.  
"Surely such a problematic infraction doesn't emerge from a single point of divergence. What if the true causes are buried much farther back in the novel than we think?"  
"Then we follow the tried and tested maxim of all Jurisfiction legends."  
My remark warranted only a raised eyebrow.  
"We make things up as we go along, of course! This should be it on the left."  
I waved at a set of thick volumes, pointing at the advance proofs from the multitude of options. Hades plucked _The October Horse_ from the shelf.  
"Ladies first."  
I ran my fingers over the fine leather binding.  
"According to Bradshaw this should be green."  
"Perhaps its carbon dioxide emissions have increased," Hades drawled. "Does it matter?"  
I stared back up at the shelf. With my book-jumping skills, red volumes were seriously out-of-bounds and Hades would see through 'Let's see how you take a passenger' as easily as armoured glass.  
"Damn it, look _Caesar_ is red. If we're really unlucky _Caesar's Women_ might go too. Jumping into a volume this size without Bradshaw's maps, we might end up in a First Triumvirate meeting as easily as a missive about the grain dole—or worse, the missive's mention of the grain riots!" 1  
"Hence the taxi." Hades's attention flicked from the books to settle upon me. "Yet we may well blunder into a Forum riot or the siege of Alesia regardless of our mode of transport."2  
"Even TransGenre's drivers aren't that incompetent. Think seven very strongly," I advised.3

I still held the book: its cavity gaped mournfully a good foot above my head. Damned if I were going to meekly hand the book to Hades and ask him to shelve it! Balancing on tiptoe and half-flinging it into the gap sufficed, but I was practically dangling off the bookshelf. My spine clicked satisfyingly: the stretch might have been pleasurable, were it not for the fact that the only way to move back from the shelf was to fall into a heap. Undoubtedly Hades was enjoying my predicament. However, to determine how far my authority (and dignity) had fallen was to move my eyes from the book unstably lodged above my head. Glancing at him, even in reflex, he would interpret as a plea for help. I cursed whomever it was who had decided upon spraying the shelf with slippery gerund attractant and resolved to loosen my grip on the book. If in falling it smacked me in the head, so be it. I felt more than heard the swish of his coat as Acheron walked up behind me.  
"Allow me," he murmured.  
Dry, warm fingers lingered deliberately on my own as he slid the book back. I caught a whiff of gun oil and expensively subtle eau de cologne. A soft breath stirred the hairs on my neck and the prickle of déja vù along my spine. All I had to do was release my hold on the book and I would stagger backwards into his arms. But this time there was no odour of chalk dust on his lapels, no thunder rumbling into the night outside the deserted university stacks. Definitely no laughter in my ear heralding a fleeting kiss against my cheek. I was still trapped neatly between a bookshelf and six and a half feet of deadly criminal. By luck my left hand was occupied with the book. My right had already reached instinctively for my pistol. Yet Hades's long fingers caught mine an instant after I touched the holster.  
"You wouldn't shoot me for a single act of chivalry, surely?" he chuckled.  
"Breathing down my neck is hardly chivalrous."  
His left hand rested on the small of my back as I eased myself down from my awkward perch. I exhaled slowly, unclenching my fingers on the pistol butt. Acheron obediently released my hands but refused to yield any space. I turned, examining him from a distance of barely an inch. Fine variations in the eyes and hair rather than uniform blocks of black and glassy blue marked him as a B-grade at least; the faint smells and warm skin were characteristics of low A-grade generics. I was even tempted to search for a pulse at his neck. In fact, I considered uneasily, no matter how detailed my scrutiny, I found nothing different from my memories of the real Hades. Except, of course, that their memories would not be the same. He could not possibly have known what had spooked me.  
"Do you like what you see, Thursday? You've stared long enough."  
Foolishly I said what I was thinking.  
"Such a perfect copy. To all the senses?"  
"Do I taste like ink or reality?" Acheron asked, grinning. "Kiss me and find out."  
He was so terribly close, towering over me with a tangible presence which made the space between us seem even smaller.  
"Not on your life, Acheron!"  
An indrawn breath, a parting of narrow lips to call me a coward—  
"Kiss me first," I finished.  
I raised my cheek towards him, tilting a jaw which had clenched of its own accord. He bent towards me, a moment's dread of miscalculation, before his lips were gentle at my ear.  
"How certain you are, that there is not a single kiss in my book."4  
He stepped away. A sigh of relief escaped me, then a soft laugh. Firmly squashing further helpless giggles bent on escaping my windpipe, I summoned a taxi.5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  1Hello and welcome to TransGenre Taxis. This is our automatic waiting for the waiting recording recording. To wait for the waiting recording think one-  
> 
> 
>   
> 2To wait for the excuses as to why your taxi is delayed recording think two; to wait for the excuses for the delay in the excuses think three; to-  
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> 3Thank you. Please hold for an operator. After being on hold, remain on hold.  
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> 4TransGenre Taxis, hello my name is Emma! I am _so_ pleased to take your call!  
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>  5Um, drop-off at Historical Fiction please, as close to 44BC Rome as you can manage. Suetonius? OK, we can walk from there.  
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	3. Chapter 3

"Any more of this crap and you'll end up like Gaul!" I barked.  
I hadn't shouted this much since making Corporal in the Light Armoured Brigade.  
"Long-Haired?" questioned Caesar with a smile.  
He gestured to the simple oak wreath of his _corona civica_ and the crown of gold beneath it, now silver-gilt and giving the lie to the cognominal origin _caesarius_ with every receding inch. If Caesar was touchy about his imminent baldness, his vanity was yet to show itself. His face had been as calm and still as the waters of the Aqua Marcia ever since we had turned up unannounced. Admittedly, it had been a mildly awful idea at best and an incredibly stupid one at worst. Yet here we were, dearth of sudden insights reducing us to retracing Zhark's actions.  
"No, a whole divided into three parts!" I retorted.  
What little momentum my witty threat had was abolished by the pause while it was translated. I was starting to think that the inevitable staccato of a bilingual conversation had been the sticking point, rather than any oblique references to Caesar's friendship with King Nicomedes of Bithynia. From the corner of my eye, my translator was immaculately togate, even bearing the family crest on his finger and shod in dark red shoes. Surely even stubborn-as-his-mode-of-transport Caesar had to admit that this arrangement was superior to Zhark's octopoid translation droid. Or not; perhaps the beeping and pretty colours had at least kept him amused. Meanwhile my tiredly-wandering mind had given Caesar the opening for a counter-attack.  
"Why lose your temper? A far more effective warning is your translator himself. Undoubtedly your inferior, Miss Next, yet wearing the senator-broad stripe on his _toga praetexta_? Not merely a figure bequeathed with the raw citizenship then! A patrician of the oldest lineage, says that iron ring on his finger; but the buckles of his shoes declare that he has never held office. A backbencher: the Caesars of generations past. Until Gaius Marius and his money."  
Thunderbolt-bearing eyes flickered from Hades to me and back again. Weapons in themselves, calling the shade of Sulla from the underworld to lurk at Caesar's side.  
"Would you have him stand behind me in a chariot, chanting into my ear?"  
"One requires a triumph for that first," countered Hades.  
"And for that a nicely-profitable foreign war," agreed Caesar pleasantly.  
"What a pity that the Council of Genres spent all of their income on issuing the DanverClones with sunglasses."  
That made Caesar laugh. The scoundrel, he knew what we were up to. What had the Cat called it? "Good urban prefect, bad urban prefect," but surely it hadn't envisaged Hades as the carrot and me as the stick.  
"And so I ought to head off meekly to the Parthian campaign like a good little generic? Taking Octavian with me to let him die?"  
"The historical Caesar did so. You have no choice but to repeat his movements," I reiterated. "Besides, Octavian didn't die, did he? Not immediately, even if there is an argument for his death being a direct result of his absence from Rome in that crucial time. Wounded, yes, invalided so badly that he was unable to stop the rise of Antony, not until Caesarion—"  
A hand rose, a wordless signal to venture no further.  
"And is it your tale to tell, Miss Next? To _me_?"  
"You are not risking punishment for a major fiction infraction for Octavian's sake."  
It was not a question. It was also something which Hades felt was beneath his dignity to translate. I ignored the implied rebuke, concentrating on the history, sifting to see what might give me some bargaining power. I saw nothing obvious.  
"Let me re-iterate: By acting out of character during your fifth dictatorship, you have allowed, if not facilitated, the perpetuation of a staggering number of minor plot infractions. That alone will result in a disciplinary sentence in some dreary Latin Grammar. However, given that you are the sole generic responsible for Caesar in three volumes of the series, the risk of alteration in other volumes will magnify your sentence immensely. If you are lucky, you'll spend the next thousand readings in an exam script—and not in the question either! We'll banish you to some rushed translation by an overwhelmed A-level student, panicking about their Oxbridge future, mixing up their nominatives and genitives, making you do all sorts of humiliating nonsense!"  
"There will be no divergences outside the final volume," the dictator declared.  
"Then why all this ruckus stirring up the wrath of the Council?" I snapped.  
"Because, Thursday, if the enemy is fixed upon one battle, it will never notice the other ambush until too late."  
That was Acheron. I had a moment's peace in which, guessing from the accusative-infinitive constructions, he was relaying the exchange to Caesar.  
"Exactly: my enemy is already aware of the minor feints I am making throughout my dictatorships. Their predictably safe response is to send Jurisfiction off on a wild goose chase at every one."  
"'Minor feints'?" I quoted incredulously, thinking of my twenty years in blue gingham. "Piling up small fiction infractions has a peril all its own!"  
Caesar nodded.  
"The risk of compounding, the inherently chaotic behaviour of narrative."  
"Exactly. Jurisfiction agents are trained to alter story plots in a carefully-controlled manner."  
"But they do!" exclaimed Caesar.  
Distracted by digesting Hades's translation, it was too late to interrupt the swift jab of Latin that followed, a peculiar superposition of statement and question that got Caesar out of his chair again. I caught his next question, tinged with the restless anticipation that fired the dictator's movements.  
"But will she do it?"  
My jaw dropped.  
"Surely you don't expect us to collaborate in your mad scheme?"  
All I received in return for pointing out the obvious was a cold smile. Bugger this, time to turn the tables.  
"I hope that you have a bloody good explanation for it if you do! There is an emergency character counselling session for all the A-grades while everyone else is busy at the Plebeian Assembly. The temporary meeting place of the senate at the theatre of Pompey. If you're not there, I will throw you off the Tarpeian Rock myself!"  
"If I am not there, how would you find me to throw me off?"  
Caesar walked over to the chair to help me up. Despite my period garb, the gesture was merely from politeness more than necessity.  
"Now that you have made your point, might I draw your attention to the reader not four pages away? I have a scene in five minutes, after which I can send him off to puzzle over the glossary and in the absence of a family tree, shove him straight to the list of _cognomines_ at the end of _First Man in Rome_."  
He arched an eyebrow.  
"Unless you would like to watch? I'm sure Servilia won't mind in the least."  
  
Having retreated back to the office, I gave Hades copious instructions before deciding to take a refreshing, shoe-less stroll around Norland Park, although these days it was more of a limp. Soaking up the warm sun with well-written birdsong in my ears and perfectly-described grass under my feet was unfailingly restful. Thursday 5 insisted that it helped to unclog my limbic energy pathways, whatever that meant. She evidently considered that sustaining a tactical victory was wiser than risking it for strategic superiority: having agreed to this piece of advice, it was much easier for me to avoid the stomach-churning energy drinks and offers to come to yoga. An hour later, chakras dubiously realigned, I returned to the ballroom ready for another stab at Caesar. Sometime during my absence, a thin binder had appeared on my desk. I flicked through the tabs, passing an impressive array of maps marked 'Setting (Spatial)', a seemingly endless timeline in 'Setting (Temporal)', and an especially thick section labelled 'Characters' before settling on 'Narrative.' Hades had distilled the three and a half thousand page plot with a concision to make even Marcus Junius Brutus proud. The final tab was 'Culture,' an alphabetised summary of the appendices from each novel. To add insult to injury, the handwriting was all spectacularly neat.  
"The remaining Twelve Tables in the original Latin and translation. What more could a girl want?"  
"Do hesitate to ask!"  
At least I hadn't started when Hades had soundlessly crept up behind me. I returned the folder to its creator, thankful for small victories.  
"Now that the stamp collecting is over, I assume you have a plan?" he asked.  
I hid a smile. Hades asking someone else's advice? Which chapter of _Degeneracy_ contained that little gem?  
"The first thing we have to do is get them speaking English again."  
"Oh, so you can throw me back to non-fiction, undoubtedly via some ghastly detour through Misery Memoirs and Celebrity Sensationalism?"  
"Am I so transparent?"  
"As the waters of the Aqua Marcia," Hades responded dryly.  
"Actually, you may very well be useful in other roles."  
"Hypothetically useful? I hope that your flattery improves before we face Caesar again."  
"It's not my fault that no-one at St. Tabularasa's spotted the early symptoms of Mary-Sue virus."  
Confusion was not an expression which sat well upon Hades's features. By the time I had finished explaining, I must have heard every example of a gleefully evil chuckle in the Ernst Blofeld Handbook.  
"Positive feedback, one supposes: as the infection progresses, so does the host's skill at bedazzling its peers, with the virus camouflaging itself by coercion. Poor Caesar!"

"Well, you two seem to be getting along!" exclaimed Bradshaw.  
Fortunately his entrance completely overshadowed my advice that Hades ought to get himself checked for Mary-Sue too. It was, after all, almost as grievous an insult as being accused of plagiarism. Bradshaw was heading for the door with a cloth and an excessively impressive rifle, which was placed carefully on my desk.  
"Is that a real elephant gun? I've seen four bore versions before, but that must be the two bore rarity."  
The idle curiosity in Hades's voice didn't fool me for a second.  
"Quite right! Nasty recoil with the wider bore, but there's not a rifle like it for polishing off the Kaiser's best troops!"  
Hades ran a finger along the triple barrel.  
"Mind if I…?"  
"Of course not, old boy! Have a shot."  
So saying, Bradshaw tossed him the cloth and a tin.  
"You're welcome to clean it too."  
The pair of us watched the scowling Hades obediently head for the door to keep the messy process outside. I fervently hoped that he didn't find some passer-by on whom to test it.  
"The memsahib's not keen on me maintaining it in the house," the big-game hunter explained. "That black powder makes quite a mess, but I can't get it to take smokeless charges."  
I could see other reasons for Melanie the gorilla not wanting a working big-game rifle hanging around. There had to be a certain number in the house for atmosphere, but those not actually described as firing didn't. Descriptive economy was a help as much as a hindrance in the BookWorld.  
"Having any luck with this new chap?"  
We both jumped. The Cheshire Cat had materialised in my outbox, leaving hairs all over the Dark Reading Matter report.  
"Sort of," I replied truthfully.  
I turned to the Cat, who wore his perpetual grin and several ink stains.  
"Whence did the ink come?" asked Bradshaw.  
"From an ink well, of course. I'm expanding the latest edition of my Jurisfiction Chronicles."  
It turned a pair of chartreuse eyes upon me. The Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat cut a menacingly sinister figure, all lamp-like stare and equally enormous toothed grin, an appearance to match its awesome reputation as the Librarian to end all librarians.  
"What do you mean 'sort of'?" it asked. "Something either is or it isn't."  
"Progress with the translator you found. Wherever did you find him?"  
The Cat preened itself for a moment before answering.  
"In his book."  
Trust the Cat to answer an simple question with a simple answer.  
"Thursday meant to ask where you found him to be suitable for us," amended Bradshaw.  
"Well you ought to have said so. Delicious, thank you," it added.  
A large paw took the can of Mogillicious that I handed over. A contented purr like an idling tank engine began to rumble my out-tray.  
"Via the same person who recommended you, believe it or not."  
I was stumped and very sick of it for what seemed like the tenth time today.  
"The only fictional people I had met in the real world were Jane and Snell, neither of whom breathed a word about any of this. I didn't know myself until after reading myself into the Library."  
"Yes," sniffed the Cat, "You were late, I told you so! We expected you--"  
And then I remembered Haworth House. An elderly tour guide droning on; my first sight of the manuscript; the patter of rain outside and Mycroft and Polly being cross with me…  
"Mrs. Nakijima?"  
I heard my voice rising in inflection and volume and forcibly calmed myself before I sounded like one of Spike's were-pups.  
"That makes no sense at all!"  
"I wish you would stop saying that as if you expect them to. I don't suppose you have any cream?"  
By the time I had shook my head, the Cat was already disappearing.  
  
"Where were we?" asked Bradshaw. "Ah, yes, progress."  
He started at my expectantly.  
"We, er, met with Caesar and had better luck than Zhark. He is more than likely to turn up at the emergency character counselling in several chapters' time."  
"You might be doing it alone, I'm sad to say. Marple and Poirot are still de-wrangling their case and you know how uncertain those missions are. Not even those two can surmise whether they'll be available."  
"Isn't this a priority? What happened to 'all available resources'? You know that no-one matches their skills at plot-extracting denouements."  
Glancing around surreptitiously, Bradshaw walked around to my side of the desk and lowered his voice.  
"Yes, but the current case is a bit, well, personal. It's in… _fanfiction_. About as much as I can say: loose lips sink ships and all that."  
Technically the two sleuths extraordinaires were breaking the rules. Only recently the internet had necessitated a massive increase in the size of Fanfiction Island: the resulting militaristic land grab had been put down ruthlessly by the Council of Genres and replaced by an expensive scheme of 'Text Sea Reclamation.' Ever since the failed bid for _Lesensraum_ , the official line was that Jurisfiction stayed pointedly off Fanfiction Island (except to escort the occasional e-book to Vanity). Unofficially however, some agents did work under the radar and everyone turned a blind eye. Those who had "flatties" themselves sympathised and those who weren't would never dream of contradicting peers who were so well-read. Boasting privileges aside, having copies on fanfiction was a lot like dealing with a large and unruly brood of illegitimate children, some flatter than others.  
"Nasty accident in a kink-meme prompt? Fem-Poirot hired by Mr. Marple to sort out his inadvertent mpreg with Inspector Lynley?" I whispered.  
Bradshaw shuddered. I could only hope that the mishap had blighted a quality fanfic where there was sufficient plot to erect character-development scaffolding. Abandoned drabbles left their generics no choice but to submit to character recycling and assimilation.  
"Thankfully not! _Deliberate_ crossover/alternate-universe fusion, poor things. Having the originals around has certainly accelerated progress, but the Great Panjandrum only knows if the quantum superposition of Marot can be untangled in time."  
Mental images of an aged, portly, yet sprightly Anglo-Belgian knitting cozies for his silver tea service were thankfully extinguished by the return of my least favourite cadet, complete with gleaming elephant gun. Perhaps not least favourite quite yet, but with good odds to surpass Thursday 1-4.

"Thursday was just bringing me up-to-date on your case."  
"Quite. Our next challenge is to make them revert to speaking English, apparently."  
I scowled at him. Acheron had pinched my guest chair rather than offering it to his superior, propped his feet on the corner of the desk and was now lounging in the Chesterfield with an annoyingly carefree air. He smiled in return.  
"How do you propose to do that?" enquired Hades.  
"The characters absorbed so much history that they started conversing in the languages of the primary sources. The poor translation of _Römische Geschichte_ from German into English accelerated matters. We don't have to eradicate it completely—a little bit is tolerable for realism purposes—but too much and the generics slide into antiquarian incomprehensibility."  
"The solution being…to undo the absorption process? Rather than not giving them any more history, we actively have to remove some of the accuracy?"  
Damn him! It had taken me hours to think of that.  
"Precisely."  
I handed Hades a list of ISBNs. His eyebrows raised steadily as he read.  
"Very well, I'll contact the Character Exchange Program. I foresee only three potential problems: _Great Counter-factual Military Showdowns_ is in Non-fiction, believe it or not; _Emperor_ is a series, the Exchange will be a tad picky about continuity even in that drivel; and _Julius Caesar_ might just be doable if we use one of the Bad Quartos instead of the First Folio."  
"Good. Make sure they do their best with the matching will you? There will be some inherent fluctuations in characterisation while the original generics are away, but we can minimise that. As long as no readers are actually studying the books, we'll be fine. Let's hope no-one is looking too closely at the minor characters like Antony, Trebonius and Brutus."  
I turned to Bradshaw.  
"Any help you need, Thursday?"  
"Nothing at the moment, just do everything you can to keep Marple and Poirot updated. I'll need a few pointers before the character counselling."  
Bradshaw left with his newly-cleaned rifle and Hades in tow, affirming that he would tell TGC and the Council of Genres what a splendid job we were doing. Meanwhile, I had an entire afternoon to formulate a strategy against Caesar.


	4. Chapter 4

The crossroads college was undoubtedly the most likely place to find Lucius Decumius. There was no point even trying to be undercover: I kept my barbarian trousers, didn't bother with a scarf and hung my Jurisfiction ID on my belt next to my eraserhead-carrying TextMarker. No-one blinked an eye.  
" _Ave Lucii_. I need to talk to Aurelia."  
"Already issuing orders _domina_? You haven't even sat down for a drink!"  
That was swiftly remedied when a goblet of something well-watered clunked onto the table in front of me. We clinked cups. I carefully set mine down untouched. Decumius stared into his cup gloomily. At last he spoke.  
"The little tyke's been writing new plots for himself again, hasn't he?"  
"Aurelia will talk him out of it," I said, more confidently than I felt.  
Lucius laughed at my best and only plan. The route to Aurelia's _insula_ was not well-described and it could be buried in any setting of the Subura. Decumius was the only person who would take me there without blabbing to Caesar: once bribed, he stayed bought, much like the ideal tribune of the plebs.  
"What makes you think she hasn't tried? I'll take you to see her if you like, but you'll get nowhere quicker than a Gaul running from the Tenth!"  
I sighed, fishing in my pocket for an _aureus_.  
"How much?"  
Too late, I realised that my gold coin was Sullan issue. I couldn't very well leave Decumius a coin that displayed that sort of spoiler in _The First Man in Rome_. Nor did I have enough denarii.  
"No money involved, I'll be generous to the likes of Jurisfiction."  
He cast me a sidelong glance. My sigh of relief must have been obvious.  
"But I wouldn't say no to a new Wagner cassette. Caesar nearly wore mine out in Gaul—and my Walkman with it. And he left a bloody great tarantula in the carry case!"

" _Domina_ , a visitor for you!" called Lucius.  
I took the opportunity to examine Aurelia's _insula_. Soft, flickering light from the candles added a welcoming air, even as the tall ceilings faded into intriguing shadows. I took a few steps into the atrium, trying to place it within the triangular shape of the entire building. Clouds glowed from a central skylight, reflected in the pool beneath. Waiting for Aurelia, even my eyesight showed that the atrium had been skilfully transformed into a verdant, soothing oasis hidden from the mad throng of the Subura. The voice came from behind me.  
"My rent will have to wait, it seems."  
I whirled, precariously throwing my weight onto my cane. I wobbled unsteadily before the new figure steadied me.  
"I was just admiring your garden, I'm sorry if I have intruded," I said.  
I followed the silhouette in returning to the space beside the door.  
"Perfectly fine, I'm glad that you enjoy it. I do wish that you would visit in daylight."  
There was more light here: I glanced at my host to thank her. What eyes! I stared. Taller than me, smiling graciously, perfectly dressed and unfazed by visitors even at this hour, Aurelia Cotta appeared to be the very image of the ideal patrician wife. In her newly-wed husband's absence, running a block of flats in the middle of the Roman slum. She would make it a _fait accompli_ by the time Gaius Julius Caesar the elder returned three years from now. I held out my hand.  
"Thursday Next, Jurisfiction."  
"A pleasure."  
She inclined her head.  
"My garden does not bring Jurisfiction here at this hour, as much as I enjoy it. If only my son were so well-behaved!"  
She turned to Decumius.  
"Would you wake my steward? Tell him to bring some extra oil lamps to the study for our visitor, please."

Following her into the _tablinium_ , I couldn't help but admire how finely-described everything was.  
"Those murals are drawn from your holiday photos from the trip to Ephesus with Landen, the tiles are on Friday's poster from the Pergamummuseum in Berlin and those dreadful pseudo-Grecian vases and so forth are off that Doctor Who episode where they visit Pompeii, I believe," Aurelia commented. "We don't actually have much existing description. Have a seat."  
I sat in a high-backed chair written sturdily enough to take my weight. To my surprise, the small study was already lighted, not sufficiently for someone used to electric lighting like me, yet probably more than enough for Aurelia, already seated behind the desk.  
"Life is never dull, then?"  
"It's rather fun, actually," the _materfamilias_ confessed. "We never know how the next reader will re-decorate!"  
I wasn't sure she would be so pleased if Joffy and Miles read her scenes, their entire Greco-Roman decorating palette being off _Doctor Who_ , _Hercules_ and for all I knew, _Xena: Warrior Princess_.  
"It happens to people, as well," I remarked.  
My host folded her hands neatly on the desk. I felt compelled to stop slouching.  
"Yes," she sighed, "Cleopatra throws terrific tantrums when readers imagine her as Elisabeth Taylor and the younger Sulla recently recovered from a horrible phase of looking like a red-haired version of Robert Pattinson. That certainly made our scenes together difficult!"  
"But others fare better?"  
"Oh, yes. Servilia doesn't mind being Lindsay Duncan off that new _Rome_ series, hair colour differences notwithstanding. Frequently Marius turns into Timothy Dalton: the first time it took us a week to notice the difference!"  
I laughed.  
"Needless to say, my son is getting rather sick of looking like Daniel Craig."  
A discreet knock at the door heralded the entrance of Aurelia's steward, followed by another household slave and the cook.  
"Your lamps, _domina_ , along with some honeyed wine and little cakes for your guest," he explained.  
"Thank you Eutychus."  
Placing the tray on the table, the cook left the other two lighting lamps under their mistress's directions. Satisfied that even I could read in the light, Aurelia dismissed them.  
"Now, how can I be of assistance to Jurisfiction?"  
Stalling, I took a cake. They were really rather good.  
"You are perhaps the only person in the entire series to whom your son truly listens. I was hoping that you could help us talk him out of his ridiculous scheme before he does something really serious."  
From the expression on her face, I knew that Decumius had been correct.  
"I am afraid that you may have to dissuade him by force."  
"He's your son!"  
She stared quite calmly at me.  
"Gaius and Tiberius were sons also," she replied softly.  
The brothers Gracchi did not feature in the story themselves, their deaths being well before the 110BC opening of _The First Man in Rome_. Nonetheless, their populist reforms and the assassination necessary to prevent them echoed throughout the narrative; as did the behaviour of their mother, whose upholding of the Roman virtues had so affected Aurelia.  
"Supposing that even the threat of force is necessary, how would I ever make him take it seriously? He shrugs off the DanverClones, utterly unintimidated by the Council of Genres."  
"Are you?"  
"Frightened of the Council? No," I admitted, "my tangles with them have been rather unpleasant, but their DanverClones can't erase me with a bullet the way they can a written person!"  
"Ah!" Aurelia noted shrewdly, "An Outlander. Someone who can view this problem in the context of their own history rather than the confines of literature."  
"All the more reason that the series must stay true to history! All the research, all the detail, it would be a travesty for it to be wasted!" I exclaimed.  
The younger woman chewed reflectively on her own cake.  
"There are other series about us, are there not? At any rate, why not replace Caesar alone and leave the rest intact?"  
She paused, sipping delicately at her wine. Setting the goblet on the table, Aurelia turned those famously purple eyes on me again.  
"I am not one to be fooled by my son," his mother explained softly, "I know how clever and charming he is, how blessed by Fortune, how smiled upon by the Gods! Yet he has weaknesses like any mortal: stubbornness and pride and grief and love."  
"If he is not invincible, they why can't we trick him into desisting?" I pointed out.  
Aurelia smiled at my impeccable logic.  
"Would force not do the job? Make him pretend that you are out of ideas and resorting to military strategy, while simultaneously leaving those he trusts to convince him to desist?"  
I blinked.  
"It's a good idea, except for one tiny detail: what if he calls our bluff?"  
"He is far from the only great general in the series! Marius, Sulla, Sertorius, Pompey, Agrippa—"  
"—are not in his league, at least in this series," I objected.  
I set my wine cup on the table.  
"Of course, we can borrow them from other sources! How stupid of me!"  
Caesar's mother nodded.  
"I think you ought to start with Marius. Of all the generals in the series, he will be most easily convinced to go to war against Gaius Julius."  
 _Convinced of the plausibility of war_ , I amended mentally. On the one hand, there was no way I would start a civil war. On the other, talking to Marius couldn't hurt.  
"That sounds sensible to me. Might I ask a favour? I can't bookjump myself at the moment—"  
"—Jurisfiction doesn't partner you with someone who can?" she said incredulously.  
"He is working on another lead at the moment. I did tell him where I was, so if he comes looking for me—"  
"—Then I will certainly point him to Marius as well."  
She held out a hand.  
"Shall we?"

Aurelia read us into the portrait of Marius, half-piped into the caption, used the momentum to pull a 360° backflip into the appendix and slid us neatly into a missive on the campaign against Jugurtha. We landed in an out-of-the-way-of-the-action campaign tent whose presence was inferred but never directly mentioned in the main storyline. It was an impressive move to keep us under the readers' radar, something even Miss Havisham would have complimented. I would never have dreamed of being able to do it.  
" _Tibi gratio_ ," I called to thin air.  
Aurelia's rent calculations waited for no-one, it seemed. My surroundings were rather underwhelming: it was hot, wind-less and the lack of desert smells allowed me to pick up on the faint odour of ink which pervaded all BookWorld scenes. The uniformly-coloured sand acquired more realism as I focused upon it; favouring the command tent with my attentions generated wear-and-tear in the canvas, faint creaks from the guy ropes and the tent fabric itself was rough under my hands. Stepping carefully around the ropes, I circled around to the entrance. In the flickering dimness of the lamp-lighted tent, two blurry figures stood alone. I paused for a moment, allowing my eyes to adjust before walking in.  
"I do wish you would stop fussing, _meum mel_!"  
The general and statesman who would become consul an unprecedented seven times and strike fear into the conquered German tribes and African warlords alike beamed at his wife. Gaius Marius stood in full ceremonial armour and decorations. He did indeed look like Timothy Dalton, I fancied, before a fleeting memory of a marble bust distorted the resemblance, the cheeks more sharply defined, the mouth stronger.  
"I am nearly finished, then I can jump back to Rome for a scene with my wayward younger sister."  
The reputation of the Juliae Caesares for making their men happy was clearly not unfounded. I watched the shorter figure facing him minutely straighten a set of gold phalerae on his armour before continuing:  
"It is my prerogative to be pedantic over your uniform, is it not?"  
Gaius Marius grinned.  
"That and everything else of mine!"  
For all that I had made no sound, he turned to face me with a swiftness that belied his age and heavy armour. I froze in the entrance, feeling more voyeuristic at being caught bearing witness to such fond domesticity than to any of Sulla's sexual escapades.

"You must be one of those Jurisfiction types," stated Marius. "Do come in."  
I limped over to the pair. Julia unfolded a canvas chair for me. I smiled at her in thanks and received one in return. She was instantly likeable.  
" _Salve Gaii Marii_ ," I said in my best (or least-rusty) Latin.  
Extending my hand to be shaken like a man's caused him even more amusement. The restrained strength was rather like shaking the paw of a tiger.  
"Never thought I would hear a Latin accent worse than my Greek one! You're welcome to speak English: we don't suffer from the bilingual malady that has struck the later books."  
My relief was palpable. Julia introduced herself, much to my surprise. While the pair of us took the folding chairs in the tent, Marius went and helped himself to another, unseating a dismayed secretary outside.  
"Right," he said briskly. "That _irrum—_ ,"1 he glanced askance at his wife, "ah, irritant Gaius Julius Caesar Junior has been stirring up trouble, or so I am told. How does that concern us in the first two volumes?"  
"It doesn't," I replied, "Not directly at any rate."  
"Do you really believe that we have some indirect influence over the situation?" asked Julia.  
"No, but your sister-in-law Aurelia does."  
"I don't suppose that she gave you a hint?" she asked dryly.  
"I am as much at a loss as you are!"  
I shifted my attention to Marius.  
"Aurelia's initial suggestion was that there was a military connection. You and Sulla are the only two generals with a hope of delaying Caesar in the event of war."  
Those enormous eyebrows produced a thunderous frown of which Jupiter Optimus Maximus would have been proud.  
"Delaying or defeating?" the Third Founder of Rome asked icily.  
"Um, either. No offence!" I added hastily.  
"Ah, but it's all the worse that it's true!" Marius exclaimed. "Lucius Cornelius is a fine commander, especially if you were to catch him at the right chapter. However, not compared to Aurelia's little chap: even with both of us he might very well run rings around our armies."  
Marius tapped the side of his skull.  
"Who do you think taught him what he knows?"  
He sighed.  
"And how I hate doing it! Mind going piecemeal, crumbling away like city walls under artillery fire. Like my _dignitas!_ "  
Julia took his hand. I felt a lump rise in my throat. Would Landen and I manage so well? I had seen myself die, even caused it, yet I knew nothing of my husband's future. Save that I outlasted him, with only the duty to guide my younger self igniting my will to live.  
"Come now Gaius Marius! The first stroke isn't a problem, nor even the second. The physical effects we can shrug off, at least for that long odyssey to Asia Minor."  
"Hmph," said Marius, "You complain I don't bed you enough!"  
The limited array of sand grains on the floor was suddenly very fascinating. When I dared to look up again, Julia had ceased to blush. Marius had not removed his hand from her grasp. Biting my lip, I felt compelled to speak.  
"If one had a chance to re-write history, I have no doubt that a better end is deserved for the Third Founder of Rome. The _dignitas_ generated by your exploits is immeasurable; of course it hurts beyond all else to see it all squandered! But when all else is gone, at the least you have the dignity of acting out a well-researched personification of Marius."  
"Although if you wished, I am sure that Jurisfiction would let you swap with that other Marius we met," Julia remarked innocently.  
"From _Great Counter-Factual Military Matchups_ , the one commanded by a German in the middle of the desert, defeated by a legion of mechanical cataphracts?2 Not bloody likely!"  
I hid a smile.  
"It would be no problem, I even know the author. Benedix Scintilla would be thrilled to have such a multi-dimensional character," I commented.  
"I would ask you to give him my regards, but they aren't fit to write," growled Marius.  
I frowned. Benedix Scintilla was (or would have been, or would have been about to be) in the ChronoGuard with Friday, but he was my father's generation. Without the two of them crossing time streams, I did not meet him. Yet I had: he had given Friday a complete collection of _Wayne Skunk's Greatest Hits_ for his birthday. Dismissing the temporal paradox, I returned to the matter at hand.  
"So I'll hear no more complaints about _The Grass Crown_ , will I? We can't have everyone deciding to make up their own plotlines, not in Historical Fiction."  
"Making an example of young Caesar, are you?"  
"If necessary, yes," I hedged cautiously.  
After all, our efforts in that direction were not going well.  
"Gaius Marius and Aurelia!" Julia suddenly exclaimed.  
We both turned to her.  
"That is the link! Not a military campaign in a series filled with civil war, but plain common sense! Both of you overflow with it and more importantly, don't find that it miraculously evaporates when confronted by my nephew. Everyone else—even Sulla!—is bewitched."  
Marius's great eyebrows leaped about like an electrocuted millipede.  
"Therefore," Julia concluded triumphantly, "You are the only people able to tell what good he is!"  
The smile she turned upon Marius gave me a pang for Landen again.  
" _Meum mel_ , as wondrous as your _dignitas_ and _auctoritas_ are, you are still—"  
"—An Italian hayseed with no Greek?—"  
"—Whereas my nephew claims descent from Venus herself."  
Marius nodded.  
"As do you! Not even Sulla can manage that. We are all Military Men, Caesar and I popularists, Caesar and Sulla patricians: the stellar ancestry is the only difference between us and him, really. Caesar can do what neither of us can, no matter how galling the idea is. He can unite Rome not against some foreign enemy, but against herself."  
"All those cumbersome traditions that I hear so much about from you, that hinder Rome instead of helping her!"  
The _primus inter pares_ did not share his wife's optimism.  
"But his impeccable ancestry, which ought to appeal so much to the conservative faction, does nothing of the sort! It alienates them that a patrician like themselves—better than themselves!—should be as revolutionary as the Brothers Gracchi. And live!"

I twisted in my chair to face the tent flaps, startled by the sudden bustle of activity outside. A young legate came rushing in, face the colour of his daily rations.  
"Reader incoming! No warning, nothing! The _cunnus_ just dropped into our glossary entry like a thunderbolt from Jupiter himself."  
His face went from oatmeal to scarlet.  
"Er, many apologies _domina_!"  
"Dispatch every formation you can muster. Distract our reader with as large a variation in troops and material that you can. We need only a few seconds."  
I was already on my feet, the "better dead than read" adage as important to me as it was to even the lowliest D-10 generic in the series. Marius left the tent in a few strides, barking orders.  
"Julia, can you take a passenger? I can't bookjump, I'm injured."  
She nodded. We turned as Marius entered again.  
"Bloody e-books! Before electronic find we at least had warning when someone looked in the index. You'll have to leave out the back before jumping out, I'm afraid. I can't stave off the reader's attention for long."  
I could hear the sounds of battle as the descriptive passages of conflict were read into reality. Grabbing Julia's hand, we hastened outside. Two javelins zipped by just as we were getting clear of the tent.  
"Thursday!" called a familiar voice.  
Aurelia had just read Hades and herself in at the worst possible time. I saw her dematerialise immediately, but the effect did not extend to her passenger. Mind occupied, I didn't notice the arrow until it smacked right into my knee.  
" _Cacat!_ " I bellowed to no-one in particular.  
My leg was bleeding rather spectacularly. In the few seconds it took the three of us to clear the descriptive area, I already felt woozy. I looked at the command tent, watching it become more real with every passing second. Acheron took my weight from a grateful Julia.  
"We've no time, read us out!" he snapped.  
My arms felt very heavy as I struggled to grab my TravelBook. Hades dumped me onto the sand, seized the book from my hand and flicked through it. Handing it to Julia, he hastily picked me up again while she started to read. I could hear the words, but understanding them was too much effort. We faded efficiently from the scene.

"Thursday?", I heard, then even more incredulously "Hades?"  
The voice was familiar. I heard Hades thank Julia before she vanished.  
"Stop waving the nail gun and make yourself useful," Acheron barked.  
I blinked slowly, watching my blood drip onto a fine carpet. My carpet, I realised. Julia must have read us out to the ACME office. I hadn't used that page of my TravelBook for months.  
"Thursday, what is—? Wait, I'll get the first aid kit."  
Bowden's common sense was very comforting. There was more jolting pain as Acheron walked over to a chair and deposited me onto it.  
"Bowden," I said.  
"Who?"  
"Getting first aid."  
"What about him?" asked Hades neutrally.  
"I had an idea," I explained, "but I forgot it. Bowden can help us figure it out."  
Acheron clearly had no time for my babbling. I heard the sounds of him rummaging through Bowden's carpeting tools, then more footsteps and suddenly Bowden was fumbling with an injection at my arm.  
"Morphine," he explained, staring up at me worriedly. "Hold out your arm, that's it," he said loudly, before whispering, "Thursday, are you safe?"  
I nodded. Dependable Bowden. I missed him around the Library.  
"Will you tell me what is going on?" he added.  
"Caesar keeps getting assassinated, we have to stop it, long story. He's the written Hades, we're on Jurisfiction business."  
Bowden sat next to me and squeezed my hand.  
"Yes, I had rather figured that out. Would it help to explain—?"  
My old partner fell abruptly silent at the sight of Hades waving a pair of pliers at us.  
"I am going to take the arrow out. You won't enjoy it a bit," he announced.  
"Wish you didn't sound so happy about it."  
" _Spoilsport_ ," muttered Acheron as he looked at the morphine vial.  
"Ignore him," I mumbled darkly.  
I was certainly trying. Carpet installation tools did not make promising surgical equipment.  
"Here," Hades handed me his handkerchief.  
I bit down on it as he began to tilt my knee this way and that to get a better look at the arrow.  
"You _are_ lucky, there are no flanges on it. I can slide it out the way it came in instead of cutting it loose."  
"Not waiting for the morphine?" Bowden asked incredulously.  
Hades chose not to dignify the remark with a reply. I clung to Bowden's hand, swaying between a curious dissociation from events and blinding stabs of pain. The drugs won out in the end and my last thought was that I should never have let my cadet into the Outland.

When I came to, Bowden had re-appeared with a tea tray.  
"It works when I have to calm someone after they've been Spike's customer," he announced rather grandly.  
We allowed the tea to steep for a while. Acheron had taken Bowden's place on my old office sofa, so Bowden dragged over a chair.  
"I took the liberty of ringing Landen," he explained, pouring the tea.  
I breathed a sigh of relief. Yes, a day off with a hot bath and a doting husband, that sounded just what I needed. Mycroft's cell-replicating, spray-on nano-tissue worked wonders as well. The scar was still visible below the hem of my trousers (now reincarnated as shorts), but I fancied that I could feel the healthy tissues being replicated by tiny, organic machinery.  
"Will your or shall I?" asked Acheron suddenly.  
At my blank look he continued: "Having materialised in his office, bled copiously over it and distracted this poor chap, one imagines that he deserves an explanation. Would you prefer to do that yourself, or shall I?"  
"Definitely too polite to be the real Hades," Bowden murmured. "Do you feel up to telling me what is going on, Thursday?"  
Nodding, I sipped at my tea. That brilliant thought I had had at Marius's camp danced coyly out of reach.  
"The whole affair boils down to the fact that one of the written Julius Caesars doesn't want to play out the part he has in historical fiction. Lots of Jurisfiction agents have tried, but the man's stubborn as a mule and we can't take punitive measures against him directly. St. Tabularasa's haven't produced any generics above A-3 for ages and we can hardly replace him with anything less. There are two options: one, make the book fit the history or two: let the bureaucrats have their way and ditch the entire book."  
"Has Caesar explained why he doesn't want to follow orders?"  
"Not in detail," Hades contributed, "We know what motivates him in general, but that doesn't seem to help either. By far his greatest concern is _Rome_ itself. Not the city, but the idea: the _mos maiorum_ in balance with the function of the _respublica_."  
"But that is exactly what we end up with in the end!" I said, "A stable triumvirate with sensible legislation that keeps tradition provided that it doesn't hinder the government. It's the thesis of the entire series, if you like: that the mechanisms for governing a city state don't work when applied to an empire; yet changing them is a potential Pandora's box."  
Bowden had absorbed all of this in comfortable silence.  
"Does this misbehaviour must happen quite a lot?"  
"Well, yes, but it's usually just a couple of characters making minor narrative flexations. Caesar drives the narrative, so when he starts writing his own plots, the other characters are carried along in his wake."  
"And they start changing their own story lines too?"  
"Exactly, otherwise they are swept away from the narrative."  
I drank more tea, hoping that it would reduce the fuzziness in my brain.  
"You mentioned a series. What happens to the books after that one?" asked Bowden.  
I shrugged.  
"There isn't one, so he can do as he pleases."  
"Can't you just stop that by writing a sequel? If the Caesar in that one co-operates, your miscreant will have no choice but to make the two books join up."  
"Bowden, I could kiss you!"  
Trying to get up from the sofa brought a fresh wave of dizziness. I sank back down again.  
"I'll manage just as well without," he spluttered, blushing.  
"Can you ring Landen back and tell him I'll be in my office?" I asked.  
He nearly upset his tea.  
"No! Thursday, have you seen the state you're in?"  
"I've had worse: I've worked while on heavy painkillers since day one at the Library. They won't notice a thing. Besides, I just have to fix this up and then I'll go home again."  
Bowden gave a sigh of exasperation.  
"Will you at least rest until you get there?"  
I grinned, reminded of Marius and Julia.  
"I'll be fine, Bowden, stop fussing."

I had just started to doze off when Hades broke into my thoughts.  
"I wonder if it is true," he remarked.  
I twisted around to look at him. The world tilted a little less than it had done. He was fiddling idly with his teacup, staring into the bottom of it.  
"McCullough's thesis. Rome does end up with a stable government, but ruled with a heavy hand. Is it really Rome any more?"  
Setting the cup down, he looked at me with a preoccupation that I had seen before. I chased away the shades of another office, another Hades.  
"Never mind, it's the task of history to determine what happens, not us."  
He reached out to tuck a strand of hair back into place behind my ear.  
"Fool! What were you thinking, going to Marius alone? All you left was a scrawl about visiting Aurelia!"  
I ignored the scolding. He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer. Still floating in the quasi-reality of the painkillers, I had neither the will nor the strength to stop him.  
"Poor Thursday!" he murmured into my hair.  
"Why?"  
He somehow inferred that I meant his uncharacteristic behaviour and not my misery.  
"Why not?"  
My cheek rested in the crook of his neck.  
"No, perhaps that is not fair. You are a challenge: the only one, one surmises, which evaded my author. Why should I not succumb to the lure of succeeding where he failed?"  
I ought to have been more worried. Yet I had defeated three Hadeses before. Why not another?  
"What am I to do with you?" I asked wearily. "Sod off back to your book! Or better, go and discuss megalomania with Zhark over tea and crumpets."  
Acheron laughed softly.  
"Leaving my superior stranded in the Outland and injured to boot? I refuse. Besides, Emperor Zhark can't even get his collars starched properly, let alone exploit an enslaved civilisation. And he lives with his mother!"  
For some reason this was immensely funny.  
"Tell Bowden," I managed between fits of laughter. "that the pigs outside my window are flying."  
Acheron ignored me. Long, steady strokes along my arm gradually suppressed my hysterics into a dull, half-waking state.  
"Sleep now. When the morphine has worn off, Bowden will drive us back to your office."  
It wasn't difficult to comply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  1 Cocksu–
> 
>   
> 2Scintilla, Benedix (1999); Great Counter-Factual Military Matchups Chapter 2: _Which troops fare better under Rommel in the Second World War: Mussolini's or Marius's?_ ; Goliath Books, Isle of Man.


	5. Chapter 5

With Hades not-so-safely ensconced in the Antiquarian vault under the watchful eye of Finisterre, I returned to my office. Phoebe picked up the phone before it had rung twice.  
"Smalls, LiteraTec office Swindon."  
"It _is_ pretty cramped in there, isn't it?"  
I could almost see her rolling her eyes at my poor joke.  
"Hi Thursday. Did you trace that index card for me?"  
The red '19 unread messages' indicator on the answering machine shone accusingly at me.  
"Ah, no, sorry. I've been rather busy…How about an update on the situation?"  
"Just this morning a pallet-load of _Twilight 3: Astronomical Twilight_ arrived in my office, just to add to last month's load of _Twilight 2: Nautical Twilight_ copies. Someone must be making millions selling poorly-forged paperbacks to poor sods who think they have the genuine sequel to a _Toad News_ best-seller."  
I tried not to groan. The days when forged Byron or Keats were top priority looked to be vanishing under the government's kowtowing to big business.  
"It's probably better quality than the real thing anyway. Can't you buy some time on this _Twilight_ stuff by using the…the green clause?"  
"What does an atrocious, modern-day, supernatural transformation of _Romeo and Juliet_ have to do with the environment?"  
I didn't know the first thing about the novel besides the ridicule it had attracted from Tuesday.  
"Well, the vampire—"  
"— _Edward_ , have you even encountered such a prosaic name for the un-dead? And he sparkles when hit by sunlight! Honestly! Bram Stoker must be spinning in his grave as we speak—"  
I considered giving Spike a copy. From what I had heard already, half an hour's recital would make even the most supreme Supremely Evil Being shut up.  
"…Right. He sparkles when hit by sunlight. Classify him as a solar-powered disco ball and you can embargo the books based upon the Commonsense Party's new Anti–Green-Initiative-Mockery laws."  
"The legislation to show that while England is not doing anything towards an eco-friendly future, we're not not doing anything either?"  
"Bingo."  
"Fantastic! Hang on, I'll just grab a pen…With luck we can stop them before _Twilight the Prequel: That Green Flash That Occasionally Happens Just As The Sun Goes Down_ comes out."  
I heard laughter at my cautious silence.  
"Just kidding. Why did you ring?"  
I spent the next hour explaining the Masters of Rome situation and how tracking down the author was of paramount importance but completely outside our jurisdiction. Phoebe was just outlining a useful loophole that might allows us to retroactively enact SO-12's anywhen and anywhere jurisdiction on a pro-chronistic basis when Duffy placed a steaming cup of Assam on my desk. Glancing up as he left, I caught sight of Finisterre hovering outside. I waved him in anxiously.  
"What are you doing up here?" I hissed. "You're supposed to be babysitting a compulsive forger and master thief, not having tea and biscuits!"  
"Yes," Jim said in exasperation, "I know that you told me to take your expert on loan from the Bodlean and classify the last trimester's worth of new manuscripts as genuine, historical reproduction or forgery; but…"  
I nodded.  
"Will you hold for a second Phoebe?"  
I took the phone away from my ear with a sudden sense of dread.  
"But?" I ventured.  
"Well, what am I supposed to do next?"  
I stared blankly at James. There must have been a hundred potentially precious manuscripts to be filed, all requiring careful handling and mind-crushingly painstaking verification.  
"Next?"  
"He's finished! Quite astonishing really, how many he identified as his own forgeries. We don't see many white hats very often—"  
"—Well, tell him you need a second opinion before filing them and…No, wait, tell him to act as a second opinion on the scripts already on file. There's sixteen years' worth of back catalogue, that ought to keep him occupied."  
James bustled off, leaving his teacup on the desk. Sighing, I jabbed the Line 1 button.  
"There's something else Phoebe. Listen, I can't talk about it on the phone. I need a face-to-face meeting with no chance of being recorded and in a totally inconspicuous setting."  
She thought for a moment.  
"Pub, Thursday? I'm buying."

 _Ceci n'est pas une pipe_ was crowded as usual. The small pub had short tables for stools and the tables themselves were painted to look like armchairs. A large, Dali-esque melting clock on the wall declared the time to be just short of the 6 p.m. rush hour when I flung my jacket at a tiny window seat from the bar. It landed on the head of one of the twin faux-broken-marble-statues which partially obscured the seat from the interior of the pub.  
"A 'ceci n'est pas une bière' cider and some cubism crisps please," I ordered, "on the SpecOps tab."  
"Coming in an indeterminate time up!"  
Limping over with my drink and a packet of something that looked more like artillery fragments than potato crisps, I retrieved my jacket with difficulty. The babble of customers was both practical and paradoxically soothing, but I still thought longingly of the space and quiet of the Paragon Tea Rooms. The only tables within eavesdropping proximity held respectively a meeting of the local Hitlerjugend and two specimens of Swindon University's first-year English Lit class. The former were now more Hitler Aged than Hitler Youth: despite the intimidatingly-tailored uniforms bristling with ceremonial weaponry, all-in-all they were harmless reminders of the Occupation. The latter, in contrast, were dangerously successful at destroying any veneer of respectability which the university had once had. The familiar battleship-grey cover sheets of their assignments had been colourfully decorated in highlighter and left proudly unhindered by attachment to any kind of markable content. I wondered if the lecturers still had the old stamps. These two would only ever encounter  OVERDUE ASSIGNMENT FED TO GRUE: FAIL or ESSAY JUST LIKE LECTURES BUT ILLEGIBLE AND/OR INCOMPREHENSIBLE: PASS. Higher achievers like Braeburn and I had seen PLAGIARISED FROM SOURCE OTHER THAN REQUIRED READING: CREDIT and ACTUALLY ANSWERED THE QUESTION: DISTINCTION. I could count on one hand the number of times Hades had begrudgingly administered the legendary stamp NOT COMPLETELY USELESS: HIGH DISTINCTION.

Detective Smalls interrupted my nostalgia by plonking a large manilla folder and a carafe of sparkling red on the table.  
"They tried using Klein bottles for the carafes when this first opened," I reflected.  
"Let me guess, they never filled?"  
"And made very inferior mousetraps. Are you sure we should be reading SO-27 files outside of the office?"  
"No," said Phoebe cheerfully, "but don't worry, all your filing is safe in my office."  
She drew out a photocopy of a typewritten report.  
"This is from SO-5's files."  
It was difficult to look politely interested while cider went up my nose.  
"Declassified," she continued in a low voice, "but probably by accident. Anyway, who would be stupid enough to steal from a LiteraTec right under the nose of a librarian?"  
"True. What have you found?"  
"Based on the assumption that the written Hades's behaviour will mirror that of his real-life counterpart, I went through all of SO-5's records from the the Eyre Affair and brushed up on the files on Aornis and Cocytus too."  
"Commendably thorough. But I still think that you would have been better off analysing _Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit_ first—after all, this Hades is Hades as Acheron wanted himself to be, not necessarily what he was truly like."  
"So, fewer flaws? Smarter, less prone to error, more indestructible…?"  
"I'm not sure that Acheron was humble enough to admit that he had flaws! To be honest, I don't think I've ever read the book," I admitted.  
"Well, you'll have trouble now: it's out of print. Christie's had a signed copy go for nearly fifty grand last year."  
"So it's worth half my dodo."  
Phoebe raised her glass.  
"Something to point out next time Hades becomes too insufferable!"  
No wonder Acheron had been so keen to help out at Jurisfiction: if he were persuasive enough, our success might earn him a limited print run and promotion from 'At Risk' to 'Moderately Endangered.'  
"What impression do you have of Hades from the SO-5 files?" I asked.  
"Arrogant, selfish, a frightful egotist; yet driven and incredibly clever too. No wonder he and Sulla get along so well."  
I winced at the thought of the two of them ganging up on an unsuspecting People's Assembly. Marius had to have a tribune I could borrow in such an event.  
"Lovely. He and Sulla can bond over murdering the plebs before he goes off to swap cuckolding tactics with Caesar."  
I took a swig of cider. The trombone-shaped glass really did wonders for the taste, supposing that it was possible to transfer the liquid from glass to mouth.  
"But I digress. Found anything useful?"  
Detective Smalls drew out a page with the familiar scribbled-upon typings of a SpecOps transcript.  
"This is your final debrief to SO-5 and SO-1 back in '85."  
"After returning from Thornfield? Okay,"  
"Does the timing here look strange to you?"  
She circled a line with a pen and pushed the page over. I could have read it upside-down, but it seemed a childish thing to point out. 

>   
>  Hades: I tried to get to London but it’s impossible; the only towns that exist in this world are the places that Charlotte Bronte wrote about and which feature in the narrative. Gateshead, Lowood—I’m surprised that there is even as much of this town.' 1  
> 

I flicked a few pages back for context.

>   
> Officer Next: Although the house was not big, it afforded all sorts of hiding places for Acheron. I spoke his name to let him know I was about and heard a door slam somewhere in the house. I pulled open a shutter and saw the unmistakable figure of Hades walking rapidly across the lawn by the light of the moon. I watched his form fade into the shadows.  
>  …  
> Flanker: Did Rochester seem pleased?  
> Officer Next: He asked: ‘You are returning straight away?’ I looked down, saying: ‘It’s not quite as easy as that, sir. There is another interloper in this book aside from me.’ Rochester strode to the balustrade. He spoke without turning around. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’  
> Flanker: Rochester had met him?  
> Officer Next: I asked about that. ‘He has several names. You have a plan?’  
>  I explained the use of a signal and made it clear that it would be safer for me to remain at Thornfield until the book had run its course. Then I would take Hades with me—somehow.  
>  …  
> Officer Next: I could see Jane bustling down the corridor and quickly shut the door and looked at my watch. It was barely 6 a.m. and only a few of the domestic staff were awake. I waited a couple of minutes, let Pilot out and then followed, cautious lest I bumped into Jane. The morning was spent with almost everyone in the house setting Rochester’s room to rights, so after breakfast I was about to make my way out of the house when Mrs Fairfax stopped me.  
>  …  
>  ‘Do we stand a chance against him?’  
>  It was Rochester. He was standing behind one of the large tree trunks, looking at me with grave concern etched upon his face.  
>  ‘Every chance, sir,’ I responded. ‘Without me he is trapped here; if he wants to return he has to negotiate.’  
>  ‘And where is he?’  
>  ‘I was going to try the town. Aren’t you meant to be at Mr Eshton’s?’  
>  ‘I wanted to speak to you before I left. You will do all you can, won’t you?’  
>  I assured him that I would do everything in my power and then set off for the town.2  
> 

"Okay, I arrive with Jane near midnight. The next day I go out into the town in the mid-morning, where 'Mr Hedge' has found a room at The Millcote."  
"Where he tells you something impossible."  
I hastily scanned the text again.  
"You're right. How did he have time—in about twelve hours—to explore Millcote, Gateshead and Lowood; to find that he couldn't get to London and to rent a room at the inn and be there waiting for me?"  
We mulled it over for a while, drinking and giggling over the conversation of the two English majors. With grudging respect, even we had to admit that there was some skill in managing to use 'like' not merely as an adverb, but also an adjective, interjection, substantive, co-ordinating and sub-ordinating conjunctions and even once as a preposition.  
"It's weird all right, but probably not serious. He could have, I don't know, tried to hire a cabbie to take him to London, then discovered that the chap didn't know it existed."  
"Unlikely at that time of night. In the morning perhaps, but given his arrival time, there isn't any other hypothesis that fits. He was probably just inventing in the spur of the moment. After all, he didn't plan to go into the book, he was forced to do so to escape Schitt… Oh _shit_ ," I muttered.  
I flicked hastily through the pages back to my father's arrival.  
"Have you got Mycroft's transcript?"  
Phoebe handed over another file.  
"Here: I turned to the correct page and placed the manuscript back into the machine. We don't know where—or when—in the book Hades went. He might have had months to plan for my arrival."  
The bottom of my cider glass offered no answers. Nor did Phoebe have any cheering observations.  
"Makes sense. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’…‘He has several names,’" she quoted. "Rochester had obviously run into him before."  
"And he knew precisely when I would be forced to enter the narrative."  
Neither of us voiced the obvious question: Had Hades been doing something more sinister than merely lying in wait for Jane and I?  
"Cheer up, it might be nothing. How much time elapsed between the two of you jumping into _Jane Eyre_? Half an hour max, right?  
"  
Phoebe reinforced her optimism by filling my empty water glass with burgundy.  
"Mmm," I uttered dolefully. "I suppose he had a few hours in which I was asleep at Thornfield to explore the town."  
I took a healthy swig. Phoebe promptly re-filled my glass.  
"It bothers me, that's all. Even at the time I was seriously concerned by Acheron's apparent inaction—"  
"—Yep, you mention in it the file."  
"He was always four steps ahead of everyone else, even as a lecturer. Whatever you did, he had always anticipated it first and used it to his advantage."  
Phoebe nodded in sympathy while I sipped the wine.  
"Especially as a lecturer, I would imagine. It's normal to think that someone is infallible if you only see them in a context where they have all the knowledge and power."  
"A lowly first-year offering ritual sacrifices at the professorial altar, hoping that the god deigns to notice you?"  
"Or is made to notice by the mysterious yet powerful force known as the Senior Tutor for Undergraduates!"  
We laughed.  
"Same again?" 

As soon as she was busy at the bar, I shoved a tenner into the pocket of Phoebe's jacket. The Fatso sponsorship board was as generous with my salary as it was tenacious about refusing the branding buy-back. SpecOps would pick up the tab in the end, so blatantly encouraging the new gold standard of law and order to defraud the service for a menial sum might even help the Stupidity Surplus. I flicked through the SO-5 interviews until she returned, distracting myself from recollections of what a painfully eager student I had been.  
"I don't know. Maybe I am over-reacting," I sighed.  
"You can keep the photocopies."  
Phoebe gestured with a new carafe. While she distributed the chablis, I slid the transcripts into my bag. I rummaged around to make some space for it and my hand brushed a padded envelope.  
"Hey, watch this. I promised Tuesday that I'd give you a demo."  
I extracted the thick envelope, slit the flap and pressed my finger pads against the side underneath. Turning over the package, I positioned my inky digits carefully into the blank postcode boxes and pressed. There was a soft click before one edge of the parcel slid open.  
"Fingerprint-recognition envelopes? Bloody clever. Our friends across the pond have nothing like it."  
"She'll be thrilled that you like it!"  
Phoebe turned the envelope over in her hands as I trotted out the potted explanation "so simple that even Pickwick could understand it."  
"The paper is lined with carbon fibre, which makes it impervious to bullets, knives and fire. There's a little electronic doo-dackey pre-set with a list of acceptable prints that does the scan and if they don't match the ones in the database, whoosh! Instant self-destruct sets in."  
"Nice," she commented. "What were you thinking of doing with it?"  
"Apart from the obvious secure courier sort of thing, I thought you might like to have some big ones made for advance proofs. The extra security might prevent leaks of new best-sellers and so on."  
"Like _Twilight_ or _Harry Potter_? Urgh," Phoebe groaned. "Talk about something else!"  
We had a commiserative glass each, then toasted to the success of my daughter's latest invention. I chattered about what else Tuesday had been inventing, Friday's hard-won and harder-to-bear passion for the electric guitar (his "Strontium Goat" covers were "completely rad" according to his would-have-been colleagues in the ChronoGuard) and Landen's occasional attempts to rekindle his magnum opus. Phoebe mentioned her latest belle over at SO-6 ("Such a lovely girl, but all those scale models from _Tank Goodness Magazine_ clutter up the coffee table dreadfully.") and the gossip over whether Herr Bight would autograph his latest fantasy novel if invited to a LiteraTec reunion.

We were just contemplating what to try next when fate decided for us. One of the teenagers at the nearest table emitted a squeal of joy which carried across the entire pub. (To give the publicans due credit, not a single glass developed so much as a hairline fracture.)  
"Is that, like, _really_ like an '86 Verve Krug? My Dad has some, and he like, says it's totally expensively out there," she clarified.  
Her friend interrupted this worthy oration.  
"That's like, so _cool_! I mean I've never had, like, some random dude buy me stuff. Not even my boyfriend buys me stuff! I mean, not _real_ stuff, just like minor stuff like perfume and diamonds and stuff. You know."  
Shifting my chair, I turned in their direction. Three champagne flutes and a magnum had been placed on the table, in what little space had not been consumed by the pair's avid comparison of each other's nail polish bottles, lipsticks and various platinum credit cards. Smiles of adoration remained plastered on the students' faces even as Hades yanked the chairs out from under them.  
"Like what is your _problem_?" shrilled the right-hand one.  
"That's like… _unnngh_!" shrieked the left.  
The Olympian disdain with which Hades addressed them was in flawless imitation of the original. So was the preference for ablative absolutes.  
"Others admittedly having been murdered for less, whereas the unfortunate irruption of misplaced similes in your conversation is both aggravating and distasteful, one does not consider it sufficient provocation to bring an end to your underwhelming and pathetic existences."  
The first-years gaped uncomprehendingly at him from the floor. To be fair, words had failed most students confronted by Acheron even in the safety of the lecture theatre.  
"Um?" managed one.  
" _Get out._ "  
They went. Desperately hoping that the manic grin on Phoebe's face did not mirror my own, I turned hastily back to inspecting the bottom of my glass. It was empty. The flute which Hades placed at my elbow was not. I gave up on ignoring him as a plan and decided that a pre-emptive strike was the best option.  
"I'm surprised at your self-restraint. No celebratory murder to commemorate your first day in the Outland?"  
Mentally kicking myself was no good. In the name of the GSD, was that the best I could come up with? Clearly my neurons were functioning below par after a tiring day. Hades responded with a smile that was all teeth.  
"You sound almost disappointed, Thursday."  
The second glass went in front of Phoebe. She held out her hand and I resigned myself to making an introduction I was almost certainly going to regret.  
"Detective Chief Inspector Phoebe Smalls, new Head of SO-27; Doctor Acheron Hades, or rather the written version from his memoirs."  
To my surprise Acheron shook it with scrupulous neutrality. Clearly while in the Outland he considered discretion to be the better part of valour. He dragged over one of the newly-unoccupied chairs, shoved one of the reproduction-de-Chirico statues out of the way with his foot and sat down. Why he had to pick my side of the table I had no idea. The real Acheron would have jumped at the chance to sit far too closely to someone young and attractive like Phoebe rather than me.  
"What have you been doing while Thursday and I were catching up?" Phoebe asked.  
"Following orders," Hades replied dryly. "Mrs McCullough refuses to leave Norfolk Island. However, she is willing to negotiate provided that we meet in person. Thus Thursday and I have two tickets for the first Gravitube to Sydney tomorrow. From there one of the Australian regiments of the SLS will provide us with a tiltcoper escort directly to the island. They are willing, with McCullough's permission, to set up a small guard post at or near her residence to ensure her complete security during the composition period. Drafts will be updated daily in triplicate under different computer encryption systems and beamed by secure satellite directly to your office and the Wessex Library at 2359 Norfolk Island time."  
His lip twitched as he turned to me.  
"With typical military mindset, Colonel Winton has provisioned for everything which he would do in the author's situation and nothing which he would not. I said that I would leave you to explain the function of a typewriter, most notably its lack of electronic interfaces."  
Following orders? All I had asked him to do was ring Mrs McCullough and ask if she would consult with us on a matter of utmost literary importance. And help Jim.  
"So you've finished cataloguing the books from the Sisterhood of the Lobster as well?"  
"Mostly. One must prioritise after all."  
Hades was saved from inventing a credible excuse by Phoebe's telephone spitting out a tinny imitation of the Ride of the Valkyries. Blushing, she jabbed buttons until it stopped.  
"It's that bloody forgery case again! Or at least I think so: 'NU-IN4MNT-TWYLT2-@POLICEST-PLSBHERE' can hardly be anything else, can it? I wish they would stop sending me text messages and ring like civilised human beings."  
She snatched up her bag and was at action stations faster than I had been in the Crimea. Just looking at it made me want another Diazuperol. I settled for sipping my champagne instead. I knew I shouldn't have been drinking right after dropping the patches, but to be fair I had had the most restrained of intentions. It was entirely the fault of my companions for luring me into temptation.  
"There is a spare seat, Hades."  
I waved in the direction of Phoebe's stool. He merely abandoned the curule chair pose and stretched his legs ostentatiously. I toyed with the stem of the champagne glass. After all, he was only like this because he had been written that way. The obvious counter-example of Zhark came to mind—mass murderer and tyrant in his books, stamp collector and Jurisfiction's most tenacious outside of them—yet he had been created as a sci-fi pastiche by a bored author, not painstakingly described by a master of the art determined to write the successor to Machiavelli's _Il Principe_. Every abominable character trait Hades extolled had been distilled into an essentially blameless generic.  
"Come now Thursday, stop sulking. I was merely playing to type."  
I was sulking? That was rich (and entirely too close to the mark for comfort)!  
"Ha, I was just thinking…"  
"Not an uncommon occurrence, thankfully. Do continue."  
"You're Felix!"  
Non-plussed, Hades set down his glass.  
"Lucky, am I? Perhaps Sulla and I should start a little club," he drawled.  
"No, no!"  
I waved my glass for emphasis, discovered that it was too full to do this with any dignity, and so drank the contents.  
"You are _a_ Felix. Number, what, nine? A tabula rasa wiped of any inherent character and imprinted upon by sheer force of personality. Will stolen and replaced by a quota of villainy and a propensity for film noir antics! He's even given you a face. Hades turning himself into a Felix!"  
I sank my head into my arms in a fit of the giggles at the irony. Hades patiently disentangled my fingers from the stem of the glass before I snapped it.  
"Is that supposed to send me into an existential crisis?"  
I hoped that the question had been rhetorical. Witty retorts proved impossible with Hades idly stroking my hand with his fingertips.  
"All of this will be over soon, after which you will never see me again."  
He paused. The briefest touch of his lips against my knuckles was far from unpleasant. I shuddered.  
"Not unless you wish it."  
Suddenly nothing had even the slightest tinge of hilarity. I raised my eyes to meet that basilisk stare.  
"What gives you that idea?"  
"We do not lack mutual respect. In combination our skills have unravelled challenges which most of your betters thought impossible."  
His expression turned mocking.  
"We've even been getting along rather well, I daresay."  
I snatched back my hand. He had not moved in the slightest.  
"I give you a lot of leeway. That's all, Hades."  
"Dear me, back to surnames already, are we? Or would you prefer to be addressed as 'Ma'am'?"  
"I refuse to have this conversation."  
A raised eyebrow at my paradoxical argument.  
"Oh yes?"  
"Inevitably this will lead to some sly jibe about addressing me as 'Ma'am' in bed, which will descend into an argument about my fidelity and ways you might engender a potential lack thereof, and that, my young apprentice, will result in you being shot. And I have neither the time nor the inclination to fill out any more of Text Grand Central's forms."  
Hades merely grinned at my tirade.  
"Well then, I rest my case. More champagne?"  
I frowned.  
"Sulking," he elucidated.  
I left. His laughter wafted after me, seeping into my ear and echoing throughout my brain.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  1Adapted from: Fforde, Jasper (2003); The Eyre Affair Chapter 32 _Thornfield Hall_ ; Hodder
> 
>   
> 2Adapted from: Fforde, Jasper (2003); The Eyre Affair Chapter 32 _Thornfield Hall_ ; Hodder


	6. Chapter 6

Landen woke me with a pillow smacked at my head.  
"If you keep doing that, Joffy will have to find a new nickname, Doofus!"  
He grinned at me, pillow held for another strike.  
"Do I get my arm broken too, or is that a favour you only hand out to brothers?"  
Mumbling something ungracious, I sought shelter under my own pillow, only to find that it had been tossed across the room.  
"Land, can't you leave a girl to sleep in peace?"  
"You have been doing, for, what, eight hours? It's six o'clock."  
The reason that this was a problem slid queasily around my brain, refusing to show itself. I shut my eyes again and heard him attach his leg and limp across the carpet. Ten minutes later, there was a poke at my shoulder.  
"Hrrargh," I muttered.  
"You're welcome. Milk, no sugar, eighty degrees exactly."  
The smell of coffee coaxed me from the bed. Sitting up, I groaned at the excess of light in our bedroom. I grabbed the mug Land proffered and looked around for my dressing-gown.  
"It's packed," said Landen, reading my thoughts. "And I've run you a bath."  
"Packed?" I muttered, hangover banging like one of Friday's rock concerts. "Packed! I have to be at Clary-LaMarr in half an hour!"  
Leaping from the bed caused another riff of excruciating knee pain, with a charming percussive background of thumping headache. Landen followed to the bathroom, perching my coffee mug on the vanity. By the time I had submerged in the hot water, a plate of toast had magically appeared beside it.  
"Thanks…Doofus."  
With Landen massaging shampoo into my scalp, I began to feel almost human again. The hot coffee and toast joined the fray and several bites of tangy kumquat-whisky marmalade with a hint of salted butter later, the after-effects of my overindulgence with Phoebe the night before were well and truly in full retreat.  
"Care to tell me what the super-secret, last-minute dash to Sydney is about?"  
"Super-secret, last-minute stuff," I replied. "Total deniability."  
He laughed, which was no guarantee that Landen wasn't worried. Last time I had rocketed off on a last-minute excursion via Gravitube, Cocytus Hades had nearly melted the entire DeepDrop capsule to molten slag just to target me. DropLo, the famously budget GraviLine, still hadn't paid the two hundred passengers compensation for mortal peril, claiming that 'an act of God' applied to any deity and quoting lots of dodgy Homer.  
"It's not SO-5 stuff, I promise. I'm doing some fieldwork for Jurisfiction, but some strings have been pulled to make it look like an SO-27 assignment and I'll be surrounded by SLS."  
"That's supposed to make me feel better, is it?"  
I stuck my head under the water to rinse off the shampoo.  
"The SLS are just there for show. I'm not actually doing anything dangerous, I promise. How dangerous can an elderly lady with a crush on Julius Caesar be?"  
There was a crash and a lot of old English yelling from downstairs. Mollified or not, Landen ran out to sort it out.  
"Tell Friday not to teach his sister any more of St. Zvlkx's vocabulary!" I called after him.

  
**Clary-LaMarr International Graviport  
Departures**

Drop  |  To/via  |  Sched.  |  Terminal  |  Counter  |  Remarks   
---|---|---|---|---|---  
Richthofen 170  |  Berlin-Tegel  |  06:45  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Boarding   
Richthofen 154  |  Leipzig/Halle  |  06:45  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Boarding   
Richthofen 124  |  Stuttgart  |  06:45  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Boarding   
Richthofen 5888  |  Sydney  |  06:50  |  1 C  |  749-783  |  On Time   
Richthofen 1762  |  Amsterdam  |  06:55  |  2 D  |  801-804  |  On Time   
GoliathDrop 986  |  Amsterdam  |  07:00  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Delayed   
GoliathDrop 858  |  Oslo-Gardermoen  |  07:00  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Cancelled   
DropStar 1232  |  Wien  |  07:00  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Delayed   
DropStar 1026  |  Paris-Ch. de Gaulle  | 07:00  | 1 AB  |  260-338  |  Delayed   
GoliathDrop 094  |  Munich  |  07:00  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Delayed   
GoliathDrop 926  |  London-City  |  07:05  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Delayed   
GoliathDrop 800  |  Osaka  |  07:05  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Cancelled   
DropStar 1346  |  Warsaw  |  07:05  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Cancelled   
TropicDrop 5764  |  Tenerife-Sur  |  07:05  |  1 C  |  749-783  |  On Holiday   
GoliathDrop 812  |  Gothenburg  |  07:10  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Cancelled   
DropStar 172  |  Berlin-Tegel  |  07:15  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Cancelled   
GoliathDrop 900  |  London-Heathrow  |  07:20  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Cancelled   
Richthofen 901  |  London-Heathrow  |  07:20  |  2 E  |  901-906  |  On Time   
TomberFrance 1019  | Paris-Ch. De Gaulle  | 07:25  | 2 D  |  801-804  |  On Strike   
GoliathDrop 952  |  Birmingham  |  07:30  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Delayed   
DropItalia 230  |  Rome-Fiumicino  |  07:30  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  On Strike   
GoliathDrop 004  |  Hamburg  |  07:30  |  1 AB  |  260-338  |  Delayed   
TomberFrance 3635  | Madrid  |  07:40  |  2 E  |  907-910  |  On Strike   
  
Current Time: 06:41 GMT  


I didn't know why I had bothered to rush. Hades had been late for everything as a lecturer. He even turned up to supervise exams late, giving the students ample time in which to cheat. (For all I knew that had been intentional.) Why I had imagined that the written one might be on time, I didn't know. This presented a problem: the Jurisfiction legislation specified that I had to keep an eye on him, whereas the SpecOps guidelines, not to mention the reputation of the Fatso's All You Can Eat Drink Not Included Wessex Library Service, demanded that I arrive to meet the SLS on time. I sighed and stared at my watch. I had never dreamed that I would want to be scheduled on another GoliathDrop trip.  
"Miss Next!"  
The baritonal hail made me turn. Hades was striding in my direction, coat billowing dramatically, parting passengers like Elsinore's cats faced with Alan the dodo.  
"We're late, save the grand entrance for when I care!" I snapped, turning to limp in the direction of counter 260.  
"Which drop are you taking?" he asked dryly.  
He picked up my overnight bag without so much as a by-your-leave, walking back in the direction he had come. I noticed a police-issue buggy occupied by two uniformed officers. As I stood there, it wheeled over, the pair of constables looking increasingly nervous.  
"Miss Next?" one asked.  
"Thursday Next? From the Jane Eyre business?"  
"Can we…I mean, if you don't mind…"  
"Guys, can this wait? I'm going to miss my drop."  
"No, no we're skipping customs, security and immigration to get you there directly."  
Climbing on board, I was met with a barrage of questions. It was too early to give more than the most basic answers.  
"Yes, really that Thursday Next. Forgery expert on a transfer, not Rochester at all. Edward? Handsome in a brooding sort of way. The 'Affair' part of the title isn't supposed to be read like that at all. Not surprised you can't find it in the new editions. Your husband loves the new covers but preferred all the sex and violence? Glad someone else likes the plot changes. No, I hadn't noticed any subtext between Aornis and I. Mindworm, no, she's my daughter. Thank you, we miss her terribly. Two: Friday and Tuesday. No problem, I'll ask her to autograph it at the next Library-LiteraTec meeting. Best of luck with the SLS applications!"

Alighting at the gate, the chief steward ushered us straight to business class. Despite my protesting stomach, I accepted the complimentary Buck's Fizz, feeling that refusing it would seem churlish. All the same, I sipped at the orange juice and champagne as slowly as I could manage. Across the aisle, Hades folded his six-foot-seven frame into the window seat with some difficulty. Glancing up, I noticed that both our seats were tagged "Academic" while the seat next to mine was "Nun" and the tag on the far window remained a blur. Paying extra clearly meant better company as well as edible food and fine wine.  
"You!"  
The screech assaulting my eardrums caused genuine pain. I groaned. So much for the better company.  
"Thursday Next! I'll kill you! Husband-stealing, life-destroying, monastery-ruining…atheist!"  
"Good morning to you too, Daisy."  
I fixed my eyes on the Mother Superior of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster, alert for any kind of makeshift weapon or sudden movements. She had yet to lunge in my direction, but the lobster-shaped head-dress wouldn't stop her for long. My backup was probably lounging in his seat sipping champagne and being deliberately unhelpful.  
"That will not be necessary."  
Wonders never ceased.  
"Stealing someone else's husband now, are you?" Daisy cried.  
"Not at all, Mother Superior. I cannot possibly allow you to kill Miss Next by yourself. Would you be amenable to going halves?"  
Fortunately for me, Daisy's veil prevented Hades from looking her directly in the eye. Realising this, he leaned over and whispered in my ear.  
"Not going to kill her, Thursday?"  
Surreptitiously, I pressed the call button. The drop crew did nothing, locked in a battle between their customer service training and the instilled good manners that forbade hitting nuns. Their indecision would run out sooner or later. All I had to do was stoke Daisy's wrath to accelerate the process.  
"We'll send you a Christmas card! I'm sure Landen wants to keep in touch," I said brightly.  
I had never seen someone actually froth at the mouth before. It was much like getting into a scrap with the Red Queen, excepting the face paint. Just as I was starting to enjoy exchanging barbs, Acheron decided to egg me on.  
"No? It would be a mercy, the poor woman is evidently unhappy with the rigours of her life. Why not save her from them?"  
Ducking a salvo of hot, roasted peanuts and the accompanying bone china, I smacked my knee hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I had two chances of winning any hand-to-hand confrontation: fat and slim. Even with Daisy hampered by her Mother Superior's robes, it wouldn't be too long before she managed to cross the seat and physically assault me. I reached for my pistol, recalling belatedly that it was loaded with eraserhead rounds. Never mind, I could use it as a deterrent anyway. No sooner had I placed my half-empty glass on the in-drop magazines to cover the movement, when it was whisked away again. A babble of German over the PA suddenly burst into English.  
"My ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Drop is in two minutes and thirty seconds. Failure to stow baggage will result in it being ejected from the capsule. Captain out."  
Two of the stewards grabbed Daisy very politely. While one whipped off the head-dress and put it in the overhead locker, the other forced her into her seat, apologizing profusely. Now I had to put up with her for the entire flight! I seriously entertained the idea of asking Acheron to swap seats. But no, I would never live that down.  
"Drop in one minute."  
The crew took their seats. (The drop itself was uneventful and worth mentioning only parenthetically.)

"Field work isn't what I would call taxing. I quite fail to see what the fuss is about."  
We had just passed the outer core and were entering the mantle on the Sydney side of the journey. Poached eggs, asparagus and smoked trout had formed a delicious (but at my age totally unnecessary) second breakfast.  
"This beats the normal SpecOps transport allowance, trust me. I hate to think how fast you had to talk to get us moved from economy on GoliathDrop."  
"I mentioned you. For some unfathomable reason the SLS suddenly became very keen to show us the finest hospitality they could manage. Which did not stretch to First Class, I might add."  
"Silly me, I had quite forgotten that you were written to have a family zeppelin at your disposal."  
"Sadly not. Such a varied collection of bored and confined evil-doers would make a fascinating example of social Darwinism."  
Hades handed his empty cup to a steward. The coffee was plentiful and hot (and in Daisy's case I strongly suspected that it had been laced with a mild sedative).  
"Alternatively, perhaps they merely want us to arrive on time, something at which GoliathDrop are utterly incompetent. Which was the similarly-challenged carrier?"  
"DropStar," I replied. "A wholly-owned subsidiary of—"  
"No, don't tell me, GoliathDrop."  
"How did you guess? To be fair, they were only relaunched six months ago. Before that they were called 'DropLo': an independent, budget carrier."  
"Hostile takeover?"  
"One way of putting it, definitely," I mused.  
After Cocytus's death, it was only my word against DropLo's that any kind of terrorist threat had occurred. That particular Hades had fooled the computer system so well that Goliath had spent millions re-issuing safety guidelines for an accidental glitch which didn't exist.  
"They refused to pay up on a compensation class action to save money. Such was the outrage from consumer groups on VisageCodex, Goliath's social networking site, that DropLo went bust. Six months later, Goliath had relaunched it as DropStar and made a four-hundred percent profit."  
"Lost their touch, have they? Only four hundred percent."  
"Goliath outwitted _you_ ," I reminded him.  
Hades promptly burst out laughing.  
"Me? My dear Thursday! You have honestly, genuinely conflated me with the real Acheron! Beyond perfection."  
He trailed off into mirth. I spent the rest of the drop in silence. I had confused the two, but when it had started I wasn't sure, any more than I was certain of being able to stop.

The Australians were obviously keen to show that they were just as punctual as the Germans. Having disembarked at Sydney, we were immediately flanked by two SLS soldiers in the paperback camouflage common in Australia. Ignoring the stares and whispers of the passengers, they hustled us to a tiltcopter parked purposely on the No Standing zone. It wasn't until we were airborne that anyone spoke.  
"Colnel Winton, Miss Next. Pleased to meet you at last! And this is…"  
"Mr. Hedge," I supplied, shaking the hand which had narrowly missed whacking Hades on the nose.  
In the hours between Sydney and Norfolk Island, Winton transpired to be as likeable as his books weren't. An ex-author fond of extended metaphorical journeys through Australiana, the Colonel had been instrumental in convincing the British government that their far-flung ex-colony had more to offer than _Skippy the Kangaroo_ and _Home and Away_ , which from his descriptions was a sort of _65 Walrus Street_ by the beach. After founding an Australian regiment to the SLS, his duties had become largely ceremonial: ironically this made him all the more eager to get out from behind his desk. I should have known that the small talk was too genial to last.  
"Your SpecOps people have been on the phone all morning. SO-5 or something? Even Mel called."  
"Her reputation proceeds her, I see."  
"Has she washed the thumb yet?"  
I shook my head: even with headphones the noise of the rotors inhibited conversation. So had my partner, who was staring placidly out the window. Hopefully he was afraid of making any inadvertent show that he was written and would remain mute until we landed.  
"Nice view? Bit of a change from Blighty, I'll bet."  
Somehow Acheron managed to be audible without shouting.  
"Mutable, certainly."  
He turned back to the window. Perhaps he was sulking.  
"It's lucky you don't keep him around for the conversation," Winton joked. "Mel said you were bringing some hotshot forgery expert along."  
"There's not a manuscript around that he can't copy, I'll bet."  
"Has there been some sort of forgery problem with McCullough's books? Mel's brief wasn't much more than 'If it defaces a book, kill it,' and didn't actually say what the emergency was, or against whom we were defending the author."  
I thought quickly. On the one hand, the best cover stories always contain as much truth as possible; on the other, without explaining Jurisfiction our mission boiled down to 'fangirl and fanboy beg for sequel' and really the SLS were just here to impress the author. (And to prevent Landen from clucking over me.)  
"Mrs. McCullough faces danger from several avenues, but we just don't have enough intelligence to anticipate the potential nature of the attack."  
"The SLS out here haven't heard a thing. Why wouldn't she report the possibility of danger?"  
"It's very possible that she isn't aware of it yet."  
"And how come the fuzz come scrambling from England, knowing something we don't from a hemisphere away?"  
"My…sources…were quite specific about with whom they were willing to talk."  
"You and only you, eh?"  
I nodded, mentally kicking myself for not packing a dictaphone. I only hoped that Acheron had been written with the memory of his real counterpart. One slip of the tongue, a single inconsistency, could ruin the entire mission.  
"Well, I've packed for everything. It makes my job a hell of a lot easier if you can tell me what we're up against, but if not…"  
The laconic shrug almost triggered a smile. It was Interrogation 101, the time-honoured Australian sport of fishing. Combating it meant being quick-thinking, but also consistent: that was the fun of it. Luckily my SpecOps days had given me more than a few tricks.  
"Ever hear of a man named Hades?" I asked.  
I didn't hear a word from the Colonel for the remainder of the trip. I had the peace (if not the quiet) necessary to concoct a plausible cover story and I thought I had invented a fantastically persuasive argument to sway Colleen McCullough into writing another book. For once, things were looking up.

I cursed my optimism when my footnoterphone rang that night. I snatched it up, nearly upsetting my glass of water.  
"Asterfloblogulus."1  
" _Ecastor!_ "  
It was the closest approximation I could think of to "If this isn't urgent, sod off." Fortunately, Caesar had heard worse.  
" _Dies Iovis loquatur_ ," I clarified, already hobbling across the hotel suite.2  
I raised my fist to pound on the connecting door, but it swung open at my touch. Something zipped past my ear and impacted with a thud in the door-frame behind me. Ignoring it, I tossed the footnoterphone to Acheron.  
"My footnoterphone isn't working as it should. There's some message contamination deleting the white-space," I explained.  
Setting it and his pistol on the desk beside his cuff-links, Acheron relinquished the single chair and waited for me to limp across the room.  
" _Salve Caesar._ "3  
I sank gratefully into the chair. I felt my cheeks flush slightly at the warmth and wished that I had something on besides the over-large t-shirt of Landen's which served as my sleeping clothes. A thin smile flickered onto Acheron's face.  
"Yes, we are here. Your messages are only appearing in _scripto continua_ by the way." 4  
I watched Hades fight the urge to resort to sounding out the frustrating Roman typography. Noting the slightest motions of his lips filled me with glee. He loomed over me, casting no shadow as he leaned on the side of the desk. I glanced around the room curiously. The bed was untouched and his jacket and waistcoat hung neatly on the hook behind the door. He probably thought it was the height of bad manners to murder someone while ill-dressed.  
"Trouble sleeping?"  
"Do you imagine that I would have been written to require it?"  
He folded his arms, fingers tapping absently on his neatly-rolled shirtsleeves.  
"You ate," I pointed out.  
"The phenomenon is not unknown in my book," he countered dryly.5  
"Much. We're getting punctuation and interpuncts now. Hopefully minuscule will emerge in spite of its non-existence in classical Latin. Is there an emergency?"6  
"Out of small acorns, Caesar…We've only been negotiating for one afternoon."7  
"No, she'll wait until tomorrow for that," he muttered; to Caesar, he said: "We impressed upon her the need for another book and she isn't entirely opposed to the idea. The issue is that _The October Horse_ ends on a positive, with the Kill Caesar Club rendered politically impotent and Caesar and his legate Octavian heading off to the Parthian campaign." 8  
"But it isn't true, is it? To continue the narrative to the death of Caesar would turn her _magnum opus_ from epic to tragedy." 9  
Caesar was being modest. The narrative climax was positively Shakespearean: mad Portia's ravings allowing her mother-in-law to piece together the conspiracy; the mounting tension as Caesar laughs off the danger; the pendulum of Brutus's resolve swinging madly at Portia's death and the appearance of Servilia; the moment of assassination itself surpassed only by its aftermath and the final Machiavellian manoeuvring to lay blame and escape it. Everything tied up so neatly. Hades raised his eyebrows at me.  
"I admit your point. We have tried to represent it as a challenge."10  
"To be honest, no. Oh, she's as pleased to discuss the series as a legionary is to inspect a brothel. But she calls a spade a spade and she is _not_ writing another book. Ending before Caesar's death _has_ been niggling at her, but narrating the Parthian campaign alone would take several hundred pages. Caesarion and Cleopatra are a challenge all by themselves! Can you imagine trying to rationalise Caesar's marriage?" 11  
I refused to let Caesar keep me up all night.  
"I think she's fibbing," I yawned. "The real crux of the matter is that she can't bear the thought of writing Caesar's decline into another Marius."  
"Sentimental nonsense!" grinned Acheron, but he relayed it all the same.  
We waited for a response. None came.  
"So, you think McCullough is enchanted by her own creation?" Acheron remarked.  
He stretched lazily, retrieving his pipe from the jacket. Draping the garment courteously over my shoulders, his thumbs brushed the back of my neck. My shoulder muscles twitched under his hands at the sudden electric shock. My voice was level as I replied.  
"Not all _primi inter pares_ are first among equals where she is concerned."  
"Very true!" A frown creased his features. "Must have lost my lighter in that little escapade yesterday."  
Hades shrugged, setting the pipe back on the desk. He perched in front of me again, gaze sparking with amusement as he continued:  
"Caesar is certainly over-endowed with charm, intelligence and good looks. I would almost be tempted, if I thought it to be of any use; were his disinclination that way no so obvious."  
I stared, lips parted but unable to remember what I had been about to say.  
"Come now Thursday, is the body not a weapon like any other? A useful one, as Caesar himself proves."  
The fingers lingering against my cheek were dangerously real, their touch as warm and gentle and detailed as any of Landen's.  
"Or you."  
Silence. I could not bear to say anything and risk a tremor in my voice.  
"A useful tool to flaw your reasoning, expose your weaknesses. Undoubtedly why the Romans despised charm and beauty so much, in those who had the guile to use them."  
I had the chance to steer the conversation to safer waters, if I could only speak. Swallowing was difficult enough. I sucked in a breath, intending to blurt the first thought that crossed my mind: anything, so long as Acheron did not mistake my silence for acquiescence. His caress burned along my lower lip and I hastily snapped my jaw shut. Reaching up to remove his fingers, I found that my own, once touching his, were held fast by some sinister magnetism. My eyes closed of their own accord. Fighting the kiss was as futile as staving off a tempest. Drawn inexorably upwards, I swayed, catching my arms about his shoulders. _For balance_ , I told myself, even while my fingers caught in his hair and drove his mouth downwards against mine, unwilling to call a ceasefire. Only when blackness danced across my vision did I rest my head against his shoulder.  
"Not what I want," I gasped.  
"Isn't it, Thursday?"  
His voice was black with amusement. I opened my eyes, saw his fingers curled easily about the edge of the desk. I had clung to a body as inhuman as the marble of a Praxiteles Apollo, still leaned against it, tremored against it. _I_ had, all too willingly.  
"Landen," I babbled.  
Acheron's laughter trembled the collarbone against my cheek.  
"Poor man, about to be cuckolded by someone not even real."  
I shook my head. Light-headed as I was, I somehow found the strength to step away.  
"I won't—"  
"No?" Acheron arched an eyebrow. "No matter. There is rather a lot we can do to change your mind."  
I backed away across the room. Acheron didn't move to hinder me.  
"If you have so much energy, spend it digging your bullet out of the door," I snapped.  
I shut it behind me and fled back to my bed.

Colonel Winton was waiting for us. We received a lackadaisical salute by way of greeting.  
"Sleep well?" he asked casually as we prepared to see McCullough ("Please call me Coll!"…"Yes Mrs McCullough.") for another day's hard negotiating.  
I yawned.  
"Too bad. Perhaps you'll rest better tonight knowing that we had no unusual activity at all."  
"Updates g-g-get out all right?"  
I rubbed my eyes. By the GSD, if I kept this up I would be a fine imitation of Quintus Caecillius Metellus (or "Piglet" as every soldier from Marius downwards called him).  
"Perfectly. We used a digital camera and uploaded the photos of each page to the three secure servers. A certain DCI Smalls says hello, by the way, as well as 'Don't let the bastard wear you down.'"  
The bastard wandered over. Late.  
"Morning!"  
Not to mention unbearably cheerful.  
"What's the stunning plan for today?" I asked sourly.  
"Oh, you'll see! Our favourite field commander called back eventually. I took the liberty of accepting his strategy on your behalf."  
"You called a field marshal? Are we not doing a good enough job?" the SLS colonel spluttered.  
"He didn't appear to be put out by your abilities so far," Acheron contributed airily.  
Winton drove us through the observation post which had been set up near the house. I noted a gaggle of sentries with automatic rifles and the glint from a couple of sniper scopes catching the sunlight. The equipment was, I knew, as professional as anything back in the UK, but the troops were green. It was fortunate for them that so far we were wasting taxpayers' money on a field exercise rather than a ransom demand or any of the other unpleasantness which had characterised my first SO-27 posting in London. Upon entering the house itself, Ric Robinson made us tea and we chatted to the clatter of the typewriter upstairs.  
"What's she working on now?" I asked.  
" _The Independence of Miss Mary Bennett,_ " he replied.  
"Ah."  
I concealed my disappointment by suggesting that his wife might like some tea. He disappeared upstairs with the tea tray.  
"Right," I said, as soon as McCullough's husband was out of hearing range. "Two things: One: any more of that shit you pulled last night and I'll have you on exchange in Enid Blyton faster that you can say 'Boring' and two: what the hell is Caesar planning? Tell me!"  
Acheron lounged in his chair, an undoubtedly shapely ankle resting on one knee.  
"You were a brilliant student," he remarked softly. "Supposedly."  
He leaned forwards, suddenly alert.  
"Tell _me_ , Thursday, I insist!"  
Caesar had manoeuvred us into commissioning another book, yet he was making changes himself, so was the new book's true purpose to cement his changes or to destroy them? The greatest modification of all had been the one I had never seen: turning the assassination from success back into attempt had been Zhark's task. Yet Caesar removing himself from the narrative skewed it in such wild and unpredictable ways that he had required the help of Jurisfiction. But why? Generics were trained to appreciate their home literature, not to abuse it.  
"Caesar believes that his destiny ruins McCullough's thesis," I said slowly. "His _bête noire_ is literary rather than historical, so he requires another volume for the author to write her way out of the problem."  
"Good! Why?"  
"Octavian. When I went to see Aurelia, she remarked upon the hero-worship he bestows upon his uncle. All of the triumvirs hold Caesar as an exemplum: Antony admires his generalship, Octavian his statecraft and Brutus, albeit reluctantly, his skilful manipulation of the Senate and People. Sulla and Marius, by contrast, only have two out of three of those characteristics."  
Acheron smiled.  
"As does Pompeius Magnus, to a certain extent. In what other vital respect do the two earlier dictators differ from Caesar?"  
I frowned.  
"Let me rephrase the question: what do they do to Caesar?"  
"Oh! Hinder him, of course.  
For a moment I despised the eagerness in my voice.  
"Marius awards him a _flaminate_ to stall his military career, Sulla exiles him, while Caesar even in his decline does nothing against Octavian. The First Men in Rome whom Caesar knows are petty: Marius jealous of him without even living to see the boy achieve greatness, Sulla choosing to spite the dead Marius by returning Caesar from exile instead of thinking of Rome."  
"And so…?" breathed Acheron.  
"Octavian mistakes Caesar for Rome."  
My old lecturer smiled fleetingly.  
"Very good, Thursday!"  
"But," I added, "no matter how appalling Caesar finds it, that doesn't give him the right to change his own book!"  
Acheron laughed.  
"He won't! Why, that's what Jurisfiction does for him!"  
"We can't, that's ridiculous!"  
He raised an eyebrow.  
"Says the woman who changed the ending of _Jane Eyre_?" he laughed.  
I was saved from replying by Robinson's return. The man announced that he was off to run a couple of errands and I ensured that two SLS troopers accompanied him. I turned back to find Hades leafing through one of the many red volumes of the Loeb Classical Library which adorned McCullough's bookshelves.  
" _Gallia est omnis in tres partes divisa,_ " he proclaimed.12  
I heard the teapot smashing upstairs. Acheron seized my arm before I could draw my pistol and barge in.  
"Caesar will be quite happy to explain himself in person. I think we should leave him to it, don't you?"  
I took the book from his hands, tensing at the lightning-bolt flicker of skin against skin. The temporary blight in the opening line13 had been restored. Clearly one Caesar generic had been speaking to another.  
"Clever! Text Grand Central only notices changes in _story_."  
"I thought you would enjoy it," Hades added smugly.  
I handed back the small volume, prepared this time.  
"By the time anyone at _Fabrii Maximi Scribendi_ calls an alert, the syntactical change will be read-erased."  
Sitting down again, I sipped my tea and wondered how to put my own plan into action.

"Hello Sweetpea!"  
I placed my mug down again while the world around me froze. The flick of Acheron turning a page extended into a dull rasp; the scents of the ocean stretched into a single briny note; the play of sunlight upon the water feature outside crystallised into a singular pattern.  
"Dad?" I gaped.  
Sure enough, he stood in the pristine uniform of the ChronoGuard, Colonel's pips winking on his collar and a small notebook in his hand. He smiled at me with the same fondness I remembered from my father at home with his plumbing.  
"Don't be so _linear_ , Sweetpea! The ChronoGuard doesn't exist once the time engines are switched off, but having once existed, whenever we have influenced matters, we must will have been able to do so."  
"Is this the 'Schrödinger Night Fever' principle Friday was trying to explain?"  
"It's very simple. Take that time when I popped in to ask about Winston Churchill."  
"Who's he?" I asked.  
"He was supposed to lead England in the last war—"  
"—Killed in a fall as a teenager, I remember! Your intervention saved my and Bowden's lives, albeit unintentionally."  
"There you are then: you live to be here, so I must have intervened, even if the me in this timeline thinks he has spent his life as a plumber."  
I nodded.  
"And the Dream Topping incident!"  
"Dream Topping?" he frowned. "What's that?"  
"You know, with Aornis…Never mind, it's one of Mycroft's inventions."  
I gave up explaining what had not yet happened between Dad and I in 1986. Thinking about this sort of stuff gave me a headache. My father put away his notebook and rubbed his hands.  
"A nice cup of tea, excellent! All that watered wine in the Julio-Pompeian period isn't really my sort of thing."  
"You've been around 44BC, then?" I asked, handing over Ric Robinson's untouched mug.  
"According to my notes, you did ask me to visit then."  
"But I haven't yet—" I stopped myself. "I'm going to now, aren't I?"  
"I have recorded that you will want to ask me a question. I have the answer for you: I thought it would speed things up a bit."  
"Oh."  
I considered what I was about to ask. For Rome's sake, I had to decide whether the Caesar I had met was sufficiently accurate to be considered a true counterpart to the historical Caesar. Was he just a charismatic figure with too much Mary-Sue virus? Could he be trusted with something so momentous? The vast collection of historical volumes; the care lavished upon even the appendices; the genuine worry over even the slightest alteration to historical dates; all these things suggested a yes. But in historical rather than literary terms, they meant nothing: the sources themselves were flawed, so did that not condemn anything based upon them? I drank some more tea. I stopped thinking about Caesar and recalled all the other characters whom I had met: Julia and Marius, thanks to whom a plan had crystallised in my mind; Aurelia, who surpassed even her role model of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi in sense and sensibility; Lucius Decumius, an embroidery of pure fiction, yet spun on the loom of history. And Acheron, the enigma whose trust rested with Caesar.  
"Problems, Sweetpea?"  
"How do the ChronoGuard manage this, making changes to the Standard History Eventline at will? I'm not cut out for it."  
He laughed.  
"Of course you aren't, Thursday! Your duty is to books, not the timeline. But I'll tell you a secret: the SHE doesn't like being pushed into outrageous directions. It tends to censor some of the CG's decisions for us. Just ask!"  
I took a deep breath.  
"Can you assassinate Gaius Julius Caesar for me?"  
"No, Sweetpea, absolutely not."  
Bugger.  
"Can you…arrange for his assassins to be successful, provided that the man himself consents?"  
"Oh yes, definitely. I'll be kicked back down to Captain for it, but all's well that ends well."  
He handed me a thick volume.  
" _Don't_ read it, not until your copy reaches 567 pages. Have you got the latest _Movable Type_ with you? I have given it to Bradshaw while he came to pay his respects when we thought you were dead after the '88 SuperHoop. He has kept it and will slip it onto your desk two days ago as instructed."  
I fished in my bag and gave him the magazine. Had I not been assigned to the case, my father would not have changed history to match the books, rather than me repairing the books to reflect history. Yet if he did change history, then the new plotlines would be accurate instead of infringements, so there would be no case to solve…  
"Linear, Sweetpea."  
With a wave, he was gone. Hastily tucking the hefty manuscript into my bag, I watched the world resume around me again.

The instant that Ric Robinson tramped downstairs with a look of mingled despair and awe on his face, I knew that whatever Caesar had said had worked _beautifully_.  
"She's writing _another one_ ," he uttered, collapsing into a chair.  
I refilled his teacup.  
"I'll cease to exist for the next half-million words! Even if the finished product is only three hundred thousand words, she'll easily write twice that. _First Man in Rome_ took nearly a million."  
"How long will that take?" I asked.  
The thought of staying on Norfolk Island for months did not appeal, even if I did banish Hades to _Shadow the Sheepdog_. After all, I had Landen and the kids to think of, not to mention the Fatso's All You Can Eat (Drink Not Included) Library Service to run.  
"On an especially productive day Coll might reach 50,000 words. The writing is the only thing which staves off the pain. Macular degeneration is setting in, so I'll be doing a lot of dictating from the Loeb."  
He shrugged. I gaped. Fifty thousand words a day was, say, 48,000 in twelve hours or 4,000 an hour. At that rate, a million words would take barely three weeks.  
"That's one word every 0.9 seconds!" I spluttered. "She'll be done in—conservatively, mind you—three months."  
"Sadly, quadrupling the physical writing time to estimate the finished product is hideously optimistic," contributed Acheron. "You over-estimate the enthusiasm and dedication of even the most die-hard editor."  
Still, it was a start. We could erode the Drongo Debt, as the Australians so charmingly called their Stupidity Surplus, by posting the SLS here for say, half a year. I could go back to Swindon, drop off my report to the Council of Genres and Jurisfiction with Hades and be free of worry for the next six months.  
"You're a star."  
I fished my mobile out of my pocket.  
"Listen, I've just had an urgent summons back to Swindon, but I will leave the SLS here and check in as often as I possibly can. I promise that I'll come back to personally oversee security when the advance proof is finished."  
Robinson recovered enough to show us out. I relayed the same news to Winton, who looked positively mutinous. Preparing to combat any member of the Hades family was one thing; leaving his garrison here long enough for actual combat to become likely was another. Even the SLS had limits. Our argument started with "Oh, crikey!" and degenerated from there, but I won the upper hand in the end.  
"What now?" asked Acheron.  
"Our presence here is no longer necessary. We'll be on the first Gravitube from Sydney to Clary LaMarr and you can read yourself back into Norland Park. Report directly to Bradshaw. I will see to my duties as Head of the Wessex Library Service—"  
His eyebrows raised.  
"Not coming yourself? We still have the character counselling session."  
"— _After_ I have forcibly removed Caesar's toga, put him across my lap and spanked him for his stupid stunt! I don't care how effective it was!"  
Hades chuckled.  
"He might enjoy that."  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  1   
>  avediesiovis   
> 
> 
>   
>  2   
>  dormiebatisteexpecto   
> 
> 
>   
>  3   
>  hellohadesthursdayareyouthere   
> 
> 
>   
>  4  
> yeseverythinginourbooksiswrittenthatwayitisproperlyromanafterall  
> ifyouhaveproblemswithit·i·can·insert·interpuncts·wait  
> 
> 
>   
>  5   
>  I've·moved·to· _Great·Counter-factual·Military·Matchups_.··Is·this·any·better?   
> 
> 
>   
>  6   
>  Marius told me what you two are up to. It isn't working, is it?   
> 
> 
>   
>  7   
>  She listened instead of giving you the boot? I am impressed.   
> 
> 
>   
>  8   
>  Providing the message that great men and the benefits of their rule do eventually triumph over the entirely human desire for lesser men to cut down the tall poppies of their society?   
> 
> 
>   
>  9   
>  So ends the _Iliad_ and no-one complains about that! Yet, one must admit that the final chapter of _The October Horse_ is a difficult act to follow.   
> 
> 
>   
>  10   
>  Don't tell me she fell for that old chestnut!   
> 
> 
>   
>  11   
>  What precisely is the difficulty? Caesarion's bitterness as he is eclipsed in Caesar's estimations by Octavian and his new son-in-law Brutus perfectly establishes a subconscious motivation to attack Rome when Caesar dies leaving Antony as _consul suffectus_. It makes the final triumvirate between Octavian, Brutus and Agrippa all the more touching.   
> 
> 
>   
>  12 _Gallia est omnis in tres partes divisa._ Gaul is a whole divided into three parts. _Caes. bell. Gall. I.i_ (edited)
> 
>   
>  13 _Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres._ Gaul is a whole divided into three parts. _Caes. bell. Gall. I.i_ (unedited)


	7. Chapter 7

The majesty of the _Forum Romanum_ was in short supply this morning. The grandeur with which my imagination had imbued the hallowed site was largely, I realised, the work of the elder Caesar. Public works funded by Parthian war booty were a massive improvement over the wheezing bureaucracy of modern Britain. The Forum of 44 BC had little going for it except the fame of the buildings themselves. All the same, I was sorely tempted to test the camera on my new mobilefootnoterphone ('A thousand words in every shot') and even got around to fiddling with the lighting settings ('Dim: ominous vocabulary for low-light situations; Fireworks: pithy:– with extra punctuation!; Landscape: added metaphor') before a voice behind me made me jump.  
"It truly hasn't changed in seventy years!"  
"I don't know why you ought to be so surprised, Lucius Cornelius, with all those arch-conservative relatives of yours in the senate."  
"Just because the knights were shown such favour under your consulships doesn't mean that they ought to expect the same treatment from me!"  
I turned around to separate the pair before another civil war broke out.  
"New footnoterphone?" Lucius Cornelius Sulla asked, diving my intentions.  
"Just checking my text messages," I said hastily.  
I sheepishly put it away. I was not here to be a tourist.  
"Nice to see the pair of you co-operating for once."  
"Why, shouldn't we?" asked Sulla.  
His question was so straight-faced that I was unable to discern even a hint of mockery.  
"I thought the two of you might like to linger ominously in the background, reminding Caesar that if he doesn't behave, he will find both of you at his heels."  
Marius patted Sulla on the head.  
"I'm sure Lucius Cornelius here can loom very prettily," he joked.  
Sulla scowled at his more physically intimidating rival.  
"Honestly, can't you patricians take a joke?" asked the Italian hayseed with no Greek. "Your Grass Crown will fulfil the requirement nicely."  
"I don't have one yet," Sulla snapped in exasperation.  
"Doesn't matter," grinned Marius, "my nephew knows that you will have one, that's enough!"  
I cajoled them into bookjumping to the temporary meeting-place of the senate without requiring an entire historical digression first.

As the minutes passed, more of the cast of thousands filled the senate. The back benches filled first, with the more minor characters turning up early, either out of curiosity or because they had no readings on. The busier, increasingly senior characters, sat closer to the front. I nabbed a curule chair on the central dais. A small table had been set up on the dais, on which I placed the new manuscript. Setting my handbag between folding stool and table, I tried to find a comfortable position on the backless canvas. It was undoubtedly the only way of keeping a toga properly draped when seated, but it was a right pain in the arse from a practical standpoint. I stretched out my sore leg, rubbing at my knee. As more people filed in, the scene looked very much like an orchestra in reverse, as if the musicians took their places in the audience and the spectators sat on stage. I swallowed queasily. That simile did help calm my nerves a little, until I realised that Hades and I were the all-important conductors. I glanced to the doorway, seeing Acheron walk through the milling senators, head and shoulders above even the six-foot Sertorius and Sulla. A wave of curiosity propagated through the milled dignitaries: women had started arriving. Julia Caesar waved cheerfully at us before moving to sit beside her husband. Aurelia followed, clutching a large pile of tablets and a stylus, to sit between Sulla and her own husband Gaius Julius Caesar. Antony leered at Servilia, who gave him a look to petrify his precious consular bollocks from six feet away.  
"At least she hasn't brought any love notes this time," Hades chuckled, bending to whisper in my ear.  
"She can't throw things at Cato from there, thankfully."  
I eyed the de facto leader of the _boni_ , sitting with his group of fellow conservatives. The lot of them were as alienated as Catiline during Cicero's oration against him.  
"Although if I were Brutus, I would be moving out of hand-to-hand combat range," murmured Hades.  
Brutus sat beside his mother, either too sensible to openly declare his loyalties to the Kill Caesar club or too petrified of his mother to sit elsewhere. Mind you, he was the buffer between Servilia and Antony, next to whom sat Trebonius, both of whose loyalties to Caesar bounced up and down more than a prostitute at a Roman farce.  
"Why aren't you waiting outside for Marple and Poirot?" I asked.  
"They aren't coming."  
"Are you sure? How the hell are we going to explain that they were off in fanfic to the Council?"  
He shrugged.  
"We only have to explain if this doesn't work. Bradshaw says that it's increasingly unlikely that Agatha Christie's master sleuths can make it, but he wasn't definite."  
"Why?" I asked, with the sort of fascination only possible when witnessing high-speed rail crashes, Justin Bieber concerts and poorly-filled kink-meme prompts.  
"Just when they had the original straightened out, someone found a second copy of the manuscript sitting on a beta-reader's hard drive. Why the gormless twit didn't delete the story after the opening line, I don't know!"  
"No problem," I said, "changing the original fixes that script too."  
"However," said Hades, drawing out the syllables with an air of self-satisfied _Schadenfreude_ , "fixing the original hasn't altered anything in the copious and lovingly-written annotations."  
I groaned. "Should have known that was too good to be true! Well, at least it isn't our problem. We'll give it another ten minutes to make sure everyone has arrived."  
Nodding, Acheron walked outside to resume his post. He was only halfway to the door when a loud fanfare ensued. Cleopatra walked in with her son. Their entourage took one look at Hades and scarpered, leaving the Egyptian pair to walk over and sit (of all places!) next to Servilia. I saw the young ruler's eyes light up at the strawberry-coloured gleam of the enormous pearl hanging at Servilia's throat. I closed my eyes briefly and took some deep breaths. So many people! I hated public speaking even more than negotiating hostage releases. The last person to arrive was Julia, to general amusement. The nine-year-old, glowing from her engagement to Brutus, skipped in to announce to me that _tata_ was arriving before running up to perch under the watchful eye of her grandmother.

I walked outside to the _peristylum_ for a final conference. A knot of two dozen lictors stood outside, the axes in their _fasces_ confirming that Pompey's theatre was indeed outside the _pomerium_ , enabling the convocation of proconsuls and propraetors without losing their imperium, not to mention foreign dignatories.  
"I dismissed them with full pay, but they simply refuse to leave!" explained Caesar. "Ever since the plot alternations, the lot of them follow me around public spaces like Echo pursuing Narcissus."  
The head of his lictors nodded apologetically.  
"With all due respect, you never know when a DanverClone might materialise with shoot-to-erase orders, general."  
"The man has a point," Hades concurred. "The Council are not required to inform Jurisfiction of their decisions until after the fact. We saw Jobsworth visiting the Great Library to inspect your book with our own eyes, did we not, Thursday?"  
"Bradshaw assured me that we had a week at most. We've used up most of that."  
Caesar looked almost disappointingly relaxed.  
"But we have a new book, a chance to start afresh?" he asked.  
I nodded.  
"I used up a lot of favours for this. Even I don't know how it will turn out!" I warned.  
I nodded. Caesar turned to Hades.  
"Kai su, teknon?"1 he asked glibly.  
Acheron winked at us.  
"Shall we? Ladies first."  
A pair of lictors pulled open the doors to the theatre of Pompey. A statue of the general stood behind the dais, staring with blank marble eyes as we walked over. The three conspirators sat, Caesar in the centre with Hades and I flanking him. I heard the general hubbub of chatter die away with my eyes closed and mouth dry. _This could cost me my entire position in the BookWorld._

I held the manuscript my father had given me aloft.  
"You have a new set of roles to play. The completion of the epic is being constructed in the Well even as we speak! Text Grand Central has installed the latest ImaginoTransference framework, the Council of Genres has awarded us a special dispensation for an extra allocation of metaphor fresh from the Allegorical River and new scenery is being designed by Isambard Bunel himself."  
Only one question remained. Would new generics be drafted in, or would the current bunch come to heel?  
"Bribery, Miss Next?" said Caesar softly. "We are consuls, not tribunes of the plebs!"  
"Not bribery," Acheron interjected swiftly. "Jurisfiction does not seek to appeal to your avarice!"  
The dictator raised a greying eyebrow.  
"Then what sin will you transform into a virtue for us? Worse than Cicero, you are!"  
"I will pass over the ways in which generics are taught to honour the text of their books, the respect that even the lowliest generic has for story, the expression of narrative which is the duty of every inhabitant of the BookWorld. What higher regard can you have for your author than the desire for a sequel, the desire to ameliorate the lack of a satisfying conclusion to the life of its central character? The flaw that you yourself admit!" Caesar opened his mouth to respond. His mother was quicker.  
"If you turn this into a tit-for-tat oration, _mi fili_ , you'll find my rent tablets flying towards your head!"  
"I was merely going to scold Marcus Tullius for making notes, _mater_."  
Cicero shoved a scroll into the _sinus_ of his toga to sniggering from patrician, plebeian and foreigner alike.  
"What happens in the sequel?" someone shouted into the laughter.  
Cleopatra scowled. So did Brutus. Servilia's hopeful expression was ruined by her lip twitching in amusement.  
"It follows the course of history, you fools!" snapped Marius. "You already looked ahead for spoilers when you were whisked off to _Römische Geschichte_ , which is what got us into this mess in the first place!"  
"Ha!" said Sulla. "At least some of us have the dignity to take the plot-lines which historical fiction gives us instead of getting cold feet. Aeneas reborn here isn't going to fare so well."  
Aurelia waved a clay tablet in their direction. Winking, Sulla blew her a kiss. Julia cast a scandalised look at the pair of them.  
"How the lot of you ever managed to run a republic, I can't imagine!" declaimed a voice from beside Cleopatra.  
" _Tace_ , you spoiled brat!" barked Marius.  
"You can talk! As I recall, you failed to discipline Young Marius appropriately--"  
"One more word from you and I'll give your young Pharaohic behind exactly the same discipline I metered out to my son! That is not how you address a six-time consul of Rome!" the general roared.  
The Roman contingent nearby wisely started sliding away from Caesarion's spot on the bench, except for poor Trebonius whose path was blocked by Antony's unmoving bulk. Caesarion, showing that he had some of his father's brains, if not his tact, sulked in silence. In the all-too-transient state of relative quiet, I waved the manuscript for attention.  
"You can take the offer or leave it! The only way you get to read what is in the draft is to sign up for the part."  
There was a babble of discussion, mostly, I was pleased to note, in English. Spontaneous outbreaks of bilingual chatter were so excited that they quite forgot to speak Greek anyway.

Aurelia cleared her throat.  
" _Mater_?" asked Caesar.  
"Let us assume that the new novel is true to fact. Where does that leave us?"  
"Another volume sounds perfect to me! Imagine all the lines I'll have!" contributed Antony.  
"Just you wait until the end," muttered Caesarion resentfully.  
"Quiet, Caesarion!" said his mother. "The two of you are crucial to each other's character arcs. Stop sniping and co-operate, or you'll never be anything more than a toddler with a few miserable lines—and he will never amount to more than a moderately fine general and a disgraceful sybarite!"  
Antony winked at her. She ignored him spectacularly.  
"It's a shame you won't be around to see your son's mind inflamed from love to hate against Caesar and the Rome which he personifies. He has some excellent lines."  
The dictator in question sprang from his curule chair. Every eye was drawn to the figure with civic crown atop his thinning golden hair and high red boots of the kings of Rome on his feet.  
" _Inepte_!" Caesar snapped, shaking his fist at Antony. "How many times do I have to say that Caesar is not Rome? Caesar is no more Rome than he is _rex_! Caesar is neither the king Romulus, nor the hero _pius_ Aeneas nor Jupiter Optimus Maximus himself, nor any other of his ancestors! Caesar is Caesar, nothing more!"  
"Hear, hear!" put in Marius. He pointed at the conqueror of most of Gaul, Parthia and Dacia. "He's not a legend, he's flesh and blood like the rest of you useless _fellatores_. Merely the least useless!"  
"Nor," said Sulla, taking Marius's arm and sitting him down again, "is Caesar anything less! Does our Italian hayseed with no Greek forget that?"  
"Does this mean that I finally get a scene with Agrippa?" piped up a new figure midway up the benches.  
"I can just imagine the sort of scene you want with Agrippa," said Sulla, turning to leer at him.  
Octavian walked placidly down to Sulla's row, picked up one of Aurelia's tablets and threw it at Sulla's head. The dictator-to-be ducked, leaving the tablet to ricochet off the edge of the seat and into an unhappy crowd of _boni_.  
"Enough!" roared Hades. "Does anyone else dare violence in the senate house?"  
Apollo incarnate apologised to Bibulus and returned the wax tablet to his former sister-in-law. There was a lull. Marcus Julius Brutus quavered into the silence:  
"Does anyone else not want another volume?"  
"Are you trying to make my life miserable?" howled Servilia. "I don't know what has become of you since you married that trollop Portia!"  
Brutus swallowed, but refused to retract his opinion.  
" _Mater_ , you already redeem yourself in readers' eyes by swallowing your pride and convincing Caesar to take the threat of conspiracy seriously. If anyone else had come with only the word of Portia's mad ravings, would Caesar have worn his armour under his toga and lived? Is it not a far more satisfying conclusion leaving your relationship in ambiguity? Narratively speaking," Brutus added hastily, "than you and Caesar having a marriage night so that he can socially underline his political distancing from Cleopatra and the corrupting influence of Egypt?"  
Octavian was not amused at his future triumvir's reasoning.  
"Well excuse me, Senator-Doesn't-Have-the-Guts-to-Con-Caesar! You'll end up with a plump, juicy role pretending to have never been a conspirator while you frantically try to undermine Caesar's faith in Antony, won't you? In nice, comfortable Rome with summers at Baiae too, while some of us are stuck in a hot tent in Parthia with near-mortal injuries."  
"The way you sulk, Octavian, it's no wonder you and Caesarion will get on so well defeating Antony!" Brutus parried.  
"Just because you're fuming at that preposterous rumour that you're Caesar's son, doesn't mean that you can spoil another volume for the rest of us!" added Antony.  
"What rumour?" chorused half the participants.  
"Oh shut up, the lot of you! Brutus is more than a decade too old. Aren't any of you capable of simple arithmetic?" sighed Caesar.  
" _I_ am not capable of simple arithmetic with all this racket!" Aurelia said tartly. "Have you any spare parchment?"

Hades took the spare roll from Caesar's table and handed it to his mother. Sulla and Octavian sat meekly as he approached. The matriarch murmured her thanks, holding a hand out for it without looking up. Halfway down the tiers, he paused. Those on the lowest bench had to crane their necks to stare up at him.  
"I take no small pleasure in watching you all compete to be cognominated 'Brutus' -- blockheads, all!"  
He grinned.  
"By all means, keep arguing until the DanverClones arrive."  
I stood.  
"Jobsworth—and through him, the Council of Genres—is so keen to have you lot shut up and behave that he will destroy the entire book. The stench of sedition need not reach his ears: all he needs is the slightest whiff. Jurisfiction dislikes the Council as much you do! We want to help! We are giving you a new volume in which to redeem yourselves for the plot adjustments you have already made, to enrich your character arcs the way you wanted to do in _The October Horse_ , in short, to complete and fulfil a true masterpiece. In the draft in the Well, you can adjust your characters, change your dialogue, make whatever alterations you like within the limits of historical fact. Jurisfiction has compelled Text Grand Central to give you this chance, but you have to make the most of the draft yourselves!"  
I paused, scanning the room. Acheron took his cue.  
"Who amongst you will take it upon yourselves to sign up for the new volume—whatever it holds!—and which of you will be replaced?"  
He swept out, a solar eclipse given human form, all darkness with a corona of blinding arrogance.  
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus shakily tottered to his feet.  
"The _princeps senatus_ calls for a division of the House! Those to the right who wish to participate in the new volume, those to the left who refuse!"  
"Good luck," I muttered.  
Caesar shook my hand.  
"Does this new volume have a title?" enquired its cause.  
The dictator for life sat quite at ease, content at his own death. I glanced down at _Antony and Cleopatra_ for one last time before handing it to him.  
"Spoilers," I said.

My own exit was somewhat less impressive than my partner's, no thanks to the lingering pains in my knee.  
"Is the strange beast of the Roman Senate and People completely pacified? Have we merely thrown Cerberus a drugged morsel, sending it into slumber until the monster is someone else's problem?"  
"Terrible metaphor, Acheron."  
I blinked in the glare of the sun after the pleasantly dim senate house. On his best behaviour, Acheron took my arm and we made our way down the steps. I was glad that I no longer had to totter on the high cork shoes deemed proper to Roman ladies. That had probably accounted for no small part of my ill-humour the last time I had seen Caesar.  
"Encoding a perfectly excellent question!"  
"Oh, true."  
I grinned up at Acheron.  
"You know, it will only take a short time for the temporal changes to propagate and fix their fluctuations in the Standard History Eventline. It merely depends upon how gently Dad has to deform the timeline and how many times he has to nudge Caesar into behaving. Cerberus is well and truly vanquished!"  
"A shame," he remarked wistfully, "that even we will no longer recall all our good work."  
He glanced slyly down at me, courteously opening the door of the miraculously prompt TransGenre Taxi.  
"Should we not make the most of it while we can?"  
"You're welcome to: I want a report on my desk in an hour."  
I watched his tall form circle the taxi. No-one paid us (nor it) the slightest attention. He climbed in to the back wearing a slight smile that I associated with temporary defeat.  
"And what work of yours requires me to be kept out of mischief for an hour?"  
"Nothing: I just have two hours to kill before anyone at home wakes up. I intend to spend the last of them submitting your report to Jobsworth and the first walking around Norland Park."  
"Wasting time while you place your cadet on the rack?"  
"Realigning my chakras," I declared with all the dignity I could muster.  
I even managed to utter Thursday5's drivel with a straight face.  
"I'm certain we can find other ways of realigning your chakras," Hades murmured.  
I removed his hand from my knee before he had any further ideas.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  1 **καὶ σὺ τέκνον** ; _lit._ "And you, my son?" ≈ _Et tu, Brute?_  
> 


	8. Chapter 8

I returned home just in time to put my newly-practised diplomacy skills to good use.  
"Muuuum! Tell Friday to stop boiling eggs in the electric kettle!"  
"If you think I'm going to boil eggs in a pot on the same stove as your boyfriend's chemistry experiments, you've got another thing coming!"  
I sighed inwardly. I had been up since six. My fellow house-mates couldn't roll out of bed on the weekend without causing trouble! Tuesday chucked the spoon she was using to fish his egg from the kettle at her brother. A blob of egg white landed on his cheek. Meanwhile, Gavin manoeuvred around both of them with two plates full of cake. I snatched both of them as he tried to sneak past me.  
"They're for Mr. Parke-Laine," he explained sheepishly. "He's working on his magnum opus."  
That explained my husband's complete indifference to anything further away than his typewriter, including the concept of mealtimes.  
"I'll take them. Go and help Tuesday—and next time, _please_ keep your experiments in the lab."  
"That?" Gavin asked incredulously, pointing at a bubbling pot of bright purple gloop on the stove, "That's blackberry-and-snail porridge with liquorice and fennel. I made it especially for your daughter."  
A suspicion formed, almost as horrid as the porridge confection.  
"Have you been taking recipes from _ibb and obb's Guide to Generic Household Management_?"  
"How did you know? I did think the recipe was a bit odd, but it says "Best-seller" on the cover, so I thought it can't be all bad."  
The two generics' adaptation of Mrs Beeton had been a best-seller, but only to St. Tabularasa's, where pupils were given a copy before being billeted in unsuspecting books in the Well. I made a mental note to put my _Caversham Heights_ souvenir somewhere out of casual reach.  
"Tell you what: you went to so much effort, it's only right that _you_ try the porridge first. Then you're welcome to divide it between the three of you as a peace offering."  
"Are you sure you don't want some?" Gavin asked.  
"No, no, I'll just have some of Landen's cake," I said hastily.  
I went off to find Landen before he could argue.  
  
"It's my fault," my husband said wearily. "Fri did say he was boiling an egg for breakfast, but we became immersed in arguing about a plot point and completely forgot about it. He didn't say that he was using the kettle!"  
"Oh well, I left Gavin sorting things out."  
He laughed.  
"What was the plot issue?" I asked.  
Landen chewed reflectively on the cake. Having discovered that Scampton-Tappet was as fine a cook as he was a butler, the Wingco's cakes were fast becoming a fixture in the household. Miles and Joffy dropped by more often too, now that they weren't threatened by the possibility of digesting my mother's Battenberg.  
"I thought about including a time-travel plot in my next book. Let's face it, with two would-have-been ChronoGuards on my editing team, who better to write about it?"  
"Should sell well," I commented. "After all, the more inexplicable a book, the more chance it will end up on a curriculum somewhere, so even if it flops you'll have a market."  
"You know just how to shore up my confidence, don't you?"  
I grinned and stole some of Land's cake.  
"Go on, tell me."  
"It's a stream-of-consciousness murder mystery centred upon the personal tragedy of a potential couple: both brilliant yet eccentric scientists who are fated to fall in love, yet allow old wounds to keep them apart. One of them dies tragically, sending her research to the could-have-been-paramour, who gradually becomes obsessed. Meanwhile," explained Landen, warming to his theme, "the evil megacorporation for whom she was working (and who may have actually killed her) also has the research, so between the forces of good and evil develops a race to finish the research. Then, after the meagcorp had proven that finishing it is impossible without her, they recruit the now-mad scientist to finish his own pioneering research, a working Alcubierre warp drive, so that he can go back in time to save her. This is only possible because super-luminal travel is in fact equivalent to going back in time, with the catch that once the drive is fired up, its lone passenger has no control over the journey. The entire first volume is narrated from the flashbacks of the scientist while he is alone in the spacecraft. Upon reaching his destination, decelerating the drive bathes the entire area in gamma rays, killing everyone except the passenger. The resulting grief would send a sane man mad, but the already insane scientist is restored to his full faculties. He joins forces with—"  
"I get the gist," I said hastily. "But Friday had a problem with this warp stuff?"  
"Not at all," Landen replied, waving his fork for emphasis, "that was the bit he liked."  
"So…"  
"I was just getting to that! In the second volume, we find that the effect of travelling faster-than-light actually makes the scientist younger, so when he joins forces with a mysterious young lady who seems suspiciously similar to the woman he has just murdered, the two of them are the same age. This adds an element of unrequited desire on the mystery lady's part, in spite of which the two develop a touching yet Platonic relationship, while solving the paradox of why the initial murder was different to the gamma ray apocalypse and who had the knowledge to set up the apocalyptic paradox to benefit from it."  
"Yes…"  
"But she turns out to be his illegitimate daughter, whom he never knew! Her mother killed herself so that her sacrifice might bring them together and allow them to destroy the perfidious grasp the megacorporation has on society."  
"And Fri didn't agree with your un-ageing _deus ex machina_ for time travel reasons?"  
"Oh no, he thought it was fine. It was the denouement that he found clichéd."  
"Oh."  
"Well it is!" chorused my offspring from the doorway.  
The pair of them looked suitably contrite.  
"I got all the egg out of the electric jug," mumbled Friday.  
"He's sorry, aren't you?" prodded Tuesday.  
"Sorry."  
"Where's Gavin?" I asked.  
"Being ill, I think," Tuesday said.  
I hid a smile. He wouldn't be looking up _ibb and obb_ for a while. All the same, I wandered over and removed it from the shelf. I waved it at them.  
"I'll put this somewhere safe, shall I?"  
"I'll do it," said Landen. "I'm stuck on this chapter anyway."  
He wandered off, taking the empty plate with him.  
"Explain to me about this time-travel thing," I said, settling into Landen's chair.  
Friday groaned.  
"You're not seriously going to let him write that cra–nonsense, Mum?"  
I laughed.  
"Obviously. I just wonder if he can recycle the time-travel stuff in another genre."  
He took a deep breath.  
"Okay, it starts off with something called the "twin paradox" that Einstein himself mentions. There are two twins, one of whom stays at home and other other of whom travels in a super high-speed spaceship. When he gets back, both twins have experienced the same amount of personal time, but the travelling twin has aged less than the one who stays at home. The only exotic part in Dad's novel is that normally the cosmic speed limit is the speed of light, so the twin who travels still ages forwards in time. With the warp drive, he ages backwards."  
"So it's like the opposite of TK Maxx?" I managed.  
"No, it's the same. In the slow time, the clocks that the prisoners carry—biological ones like their heartbeat or mechanical ones like their watches—tick over more slowly than watches outside. When they finish their sentence, they've aged less than they would in a normal prison."  
I frowned. Well, I had asked for it.  
"It's like books, Mum," interrupted Tuesday.  
Trust my daughter to think that I understood everything if it included a literary simile.  
"Books are a natural source of fast time: you spend what seems like an hour reading one, but six hours have elapsed," she joked.  
I threw up my hands.  
"Fine, you two win! I'm going to see what your father is up to."  
  
I found Landen in the unlikeliest of all places: the butler's quarters.  
"Good idea, darling. The Wingco never reads: it's too much like a working holiday."  
"Hmm?"  
He leafed absently through a hardback as I walked up behind him.  
"Don't tell me you've found my collection of the ten most boring classics! You'll be asleep before you turn the page."  
For obvious reasons, I had bought the books but squirrelled them away for safe-keeping. I had never confessed to the maudlin reason that I would need them: I would leave that until I had no other choice.  
"Why this one?" asked Landen, holding up his book. "It isn't boring! Quite the opposite actually."  
I took one look at the title and snatched it back.  
"You know, I completely forgot that I had this. It's worth half of Pickers apparently."  
"For a paperback with a pencil signature: it was on the news. Wish you'd remembered about ten years ago. We were in a tight spot financially, however rosy it's turned out now. We could have bought a house with that edition!"  
I stared at him. This was uncharacteristic, even for my ever-practical husband.  
"Well, I forgot. I've never read it, I don't think. It just…sits there."  
"And is moved every time you do. Swindon thrice, plus whenever you changed houses in London."  
I ignored that. Landen was jealous of a _book_? The idea was too incredible to contemplate. I absently uncreased the page where Landen had folded it over.  
"Mel wants to introduce corporal punishment for corner-folders," I remarked. "Be careful!"  
But my joking fell flat. Landen had the sort of look on his face that I probably wore at the mention of Daisy.  
"You know that I trust you with all of this action girl, chasing baddies in the wilds of fiction stuff, don't you? Black-and-white morality situations, there's no-one better. I just… When it's the mid-tones, I hope you know what you're doing."  
He left without another word. I folded out the crease again, then noticed that he'd only turned as far as the frontispiece. He was right, partially: selling the advance proof would have made us a lot better off, or at least saved us a lot of worrying over tax. I deciphered the dedication, in handwriting so familiar from another set of notes on consuls and legionaries. The inscription was enough to make anyone blush, the way Acheron had sung my praises. I slammed the book shut and stuffed it back on the shelf. Envious of a book. He was dim sometimes.  
  
"Message from Bradshaw," said Scampton-Tippett politely.  
I set aside my crossword and took _Bradshaw and the Natives of the Umpopo_ from him.

> Dear Thurs,  
>  Textual changes working wonderfully. Mrs. Bradshaw and I are holding a small soiree in your honour. I explained your minor book-jumping inconvenience to that Mrs. Nakijima the Cat mentioned and she is more than happy to pop back out to the Outland to fetch you and jump you back. Dear girl says that she'll arrive at seven. Between the third and fourth chapters of _Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser_ , black tie or toga.  
>  Fondest regards,  
>  Trafford Bradshaw CBE

  
"I've polished your heels and laid out all of your suitable attire. I took the liberty of asking Miss Parke-Laine to match jewellery and dresses, it's not my field of expertise. Is there anything else?"  
"No, that's very efficient. Thanks very much Wingco."  
I would just have to leave the hot bath and Puccini for another night.

"…Aeneas suddenly ends up in the middle of a battle in some foreign field, surrounded by people speaking in a strange tongue. Hoping to find some of his shipwrecked companions he cries 'Ecquis? Ecquis?' King Richard hears him and yells 'No, I asked for the horse first!'"  
A chorus of groans ran around the table.  
"What's the most romantic vegetable according to Catullus? 'Lettuce live, my Lesbia, and lettuce love--'"  
It wasn't often that a gaggle of consuls and dictators let their hair down, that much was obvious. I was admittedly slightly tipsy and everyone else was well into their cups. Bradshaw's cups actually, which explained a lot, since he never subscribed to 'this funny foreign custom of diluting a perfectly good drop'. I decided to seize the day before the jokes got any worse (or the proconsuls any more interpunctuated). I snatched up my dessert spoon and banged it against the rim of my glass. Too late, I realised that this was probably a common sign of approval in legionary circles.  
" _Tacete·ineptes!_ " roared Caesar.  
I could have heard a pin drop.  
"Thanks," I giggled.  
I cleared my throat.  
"Er… I—as does everyone around this table!—feel indebted to our hosts for throwing such a splendid party—"  
"audite·audite·"  
"— _And_ ," I shouted above the cacophony, "for humouring the exotic customs of their guests. Now that we have successfully resolved this…unique case…peacefully, I implore everyone to show appropriate thanks to out hosts and make their way to their own volumes. Thank you, Melanie and Trafford!"  
"To Melanie and Trafford!" echoed Hades, standing opposite me and raising his glass.  
Everyone else fell into line beautifully. In the candlelight I saw Melanie blush the same colour as her steel grey nail paint. There was the usual scraping of chairs as everyone extricated themselves from the table sat, somehow keeping their togas properly draped.  
"Terribly sorry you lot all had to sit on chairs in those outfits, we didn't have enough stools! Looks damn splendid though!" roared Bradshaw.  
"I'm ever so glad the food was up to scratch!" added Melanie. "Crispy, deep-fried dormice will becomes a firm favourite in my house from now on!"  
Amidst the avalanche of clapping and more toasts, I smothered a yawn. Emperor Zhark handed me his coffee.  
"Milk in it," he sniffed. "A properly tyrannical ruler should only ever drink coffee as black as his soul!" he declared.  
"Ch-cheers," I mumbled.  
I took a sip and coughed.  
"A bit strong? I did ask for it properly, tyrannically potent."  
At least occupied by the coffee, I wouldn't have to make any comments about his inebriation-fuelled pronouncements. Luckily Mrs Nakijima rescued me from both.  
"I said I'd be back in time for Mrs. Fairfax' curfew," she said. "I'll jump you back to the Outland and just make it back to Thornfield in time for _Celebrity Kidney Swap_ , it's Grace Poole's favourite."  
"You brought a t-t-television from Osaka?" I yawned.  
"Oh yes, it's how I first made friends with the servants. We're always a month or so behind, of course: I can only pick up the programme recordings when I go home to check on my family, then I just jump back with them. Jane and Edward never know of its existence, I'm very careful."  
I rose from the chair, wobbling slightly on my heels.  
"I'm not used to wearing these sodding things any more."  
Acheron was around my side of the table before I could blink. He took my arm before I fell over.  
"I wish you would stop moving that fast, it's uncanny."  
He laughed.  
"Terribly bad manners to eavesdrop, but I notice that you're jumping Thursday home. I wonder if I might free you from that burden?"  
"No, no, no! I can't let BookWorld characters into the Outland without special permission from the Bellman at Jurisfiction!"  
"Oh, I would never ask normally," he said softly, "but I…"  
He stared skywards, drawing a deep breath.  
"…I owe her…"  
A muscle in his cheek twitched.  
"…an _apology_." he finished. "And I would only be in the real world for a few minutes."  
"Well, we couldn't possibly let you out of our sights," Mrs Nakijima temporised.  
"Naturally: and the two of us could return to Norland Park together immediately afterwards."  
"Well, I can't see what harm it would do, just this once, since you are supervised by two Jurisfiction personnel."  
"Thank you."  
The three of us walked in silence for a while, looking for a quiet place from which to jump. The nocturnal jungle noises gradually drowned out the revelry back at the table.  
"Ah!" said Mrs Nakijima suddenly. "You're that Hades! Did you ever get your letter?"  
"My letter?" he asked blankly.  
"You know, just before I retired from the book tourism business. You asked me to sneak out a letter for one of my customers who had taken quite a shine to you. It was even addressed to "Mrs. A. Hades," which I why I remembered it. So curious! As if the poor girl from the Outland thought she had married you!"  
She stopped and glanced askance at me.  
"I'm sorry, I suppose it's none of our business."  
Even in the dim light I was certain of the frown on Acheron's features.  
"You know," he said slowly, "I never did get a reply. I suppose I wasn't expecting one, considering that you were moving permanently to _Jane Eyre_."  
I felt his shoulders lift with the changing pressure on my arm.  
"It was more of a hail to let her know that I was there, really. I didn't intend for a letter in return."  
I digested this in silence. There was a strange fuzz in my brain that stopped me from seeing the clue that was obviously right before my eyes.  
"Will here do?" he asked.  
Mrs Nakijima nodded and the jungles of East Africa were whisked away before my eyes.

The house and grounds were quiet. Even Tuesday must have gone to bed. The automatic security light blinked on, bathing us in an unpleasantly sudden spotlight. I entered the security code and waited as the gates creaked open. I heard Acheron shift his weight on the gravel.  
"You're going to apologize?" I asked incredulously.  
I noticed Mrs Nakijima move to a discreet distance. I felt a stab of guilt: I had already thanked her for jumping me here; now she was bending the rules even more. I shifted back to Acheron. The archaic white tie that he wore made him seem even taller than usual. His lips twitched into a grimace.  
"I shall. I was not the most well-behaved of cadets, I must admit."  
I held out a hand.  
"Truce?"  
He laughed softly.  
"I'd settle for a kiss…"  
"Cheeky sod," I spluttered.  
I reached up to peck him on the cheek anyway. I wasn't going to back out a coward. He struck like the viper and in some tiny splinter of a moment I felt his warm fingers cup my face and his cold lips on mine and for a small eternity knew nothing at all. I stalked up the driveway, not looking back.

"What was that?" demanded Landen as I walked in.  
"Can you be less specific? It's the-GSD-knows-when in the morning, my feet hurt, I spent my evening shepherding a bunch of drunken Roman consuls and I'd quite like to go to bed."  
My emphatic yawn was entirely unbidden.  
"With me, I hope."  
"What is that supposed to mean?"  
I kicked off my shoes viciously.  
"You disappear off to a party with a mystery woman from Jurisfiction, who certainly knows _you_ despite the fact that none of us has ever seen her; Scampton-Tappet refuses to explain where you are when I get your voicemail about ten times and when you do come back leaving me sick with worry if you'd been kidnapped by Goliath or attacked by a Minotaur, I see you having a nice snog with Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Murderous."  
Mine wasn't the only voice rising into serious ranting mode.  
"As I just explained, Mrs. Nakijima and I and a load of other Jurisfiction staff went to a party."  
I took a few calming breaths before continuing at an entirely more reasonable volume.  
"Yes? We agree on that?" I asked.  
Landen nodded mutinously.  
"In _Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser_ which is to say in an era when not even the telephone has been invented yet, let alone mobiles, and there's no reception in the BookWorld anyway. Fine so far?"  
"Now I suppose you're going to tell me that a master criminal is Jurisfiction?"  
"Yes, we were both assigned the same case, which…"  
Realisation dawned.  
"You know this already, don't you? Bowden must have told you!"  
" _Yes_. What were you thinking Thursday? He's a homicidal maniac who kidnapped your aunt and uncle, killed countless people and tried to kill you—"  
Landen started pacing up and down the hall.  
"—I am not going to have this conversation if you refuse to stand and talk like an adult!" I snapped.  
He wheeled around to face me and stomped up the hallway again.  
"I'm listening."  
"Okay, good. At Jurisfiction we don't get a choice over which mentor is assigned which mentee, all we can do is fire them," I hurried on to paper over the slight lie, "so I couldn't throw Ach--Hades back on the trainee pile unless he cocked up. And he, by which I mean the version of Hades that Acheron described in his book, turned out to be very competent."  
At least he was quiet now.  
"I let my guard down. I let myself think that because we were on the same side and because he wasn't the real Acheron Hades, he wasn't my enemy. If the worst thing he decided to manipulate me into was a free snog, then I'm not too cut up about the issue. It could have been a lot worse."  
Landen opened his mouth.  
"But, I'll admit it was foolish."  
I trailed off.  
"That's it, is it? You were foolish? I sit at home hoping that you've learned after all of the Synthetic Thursday mess to slow down a bit, worrying that you're off on some Jurisfiction adventure instead of doing your job here as a librarian, only to have Bowden Cable ring up and confirm all my fears and you can't even manage a 'sorry'?"  
"I _am_ sorry Land! But I'm angry too, kicking myself for taking such a risk. Can you see why sorry is a little lower on my priorities?"  
The grumble I heard in return might well have been a yes.  
"If he's a character out of a book, what's he doing in the real world?"  
"Under the supervision of two Jurisfiction agents, it's only negligibly illegal."  
"Only if someone gets caught, you mean!"  
"Mrs Nakijima will be fine, she's more experienced than I am. She even ran a trans-fictional tourism business in _Jane Eyre_ at the same time as Hades and I were there. It's how we met, in fact…"  
The letter. The real Hades must have asked 'Mrs. A. Hades,' ( _Aornis_ , who else?) to jump in with Mrs Nakijima and extract him. Our impasse over the Prose Portal removed, he could have called my bluff and left me there forever. I shook myself. Of course he couldn't have: I had had spies out to ensure I always knew where he was. That much was routine anti-terrorist procedure, even Hades would have known that.  
"No," I breathed.  
It was almost too clever to contemplate.  
"No, what, darling?"  
I snatched the phone off the hall table without answering and started dialling. All I got was an answering machine. I yelled obscenities that would have made Sulla proud.  
"You're being mysterious again," said Landen darkly.  
"The answering machine is on at SO-27."  
"Detective Smalls's home number is redial seven."  
Time crawled to a halt as I tried to piece everything together. Five rings. Eight.  
"Hey Thursday, you heard the bad news!"  
"I caused the bad news. Arrogant, smug, selfish bastard! All that crap about me being a challenge while I was being played like a Beethoven sonata! He wanted me to figure it out! Of course he had to wait until knowing was harmless, but he'd waited twenty years, what was a few days?"  
My rant had generated nothing more harmful than a confused silence.  
"What? There's no way you know who leaked McCullough's new book!"  
"Is that all?" I choked out.  
I started to laugh.  
"What's your bad news then, if my SLS scandal is so petty? Spill, I bet it can't be any worse!"  
So I did: the letter which had been Hades's backup plan; the suspicion that Hades knew if I could find _a_ Hades in _Jane Eyre_ , I would never have looked for another one; the way all the generics billeted in _Rebecca_ had become Mrs. Danvers; the little things I had been too off-balance to notice properly, like the way Acheron had never smelled of ink, that he breathed and ate and drank in the Outland without having to be told how, that he had never bookjumped even to arrive in the Library, the mannerisms in all-too-flawless imitation of the original even when he was outside the ImaginoTransference engines of the BookWorld.  
"So you see, my confusion over which of them was real and which was the generic was intuition after all. And I should have listened to it!" I howled.  
I sniffled and accepted Landen's conciliatory Kleenex.  
"Cheer up!" said Phoebe.  
"'Cheer up'?" I repeated incredulously. "Because of me, the third-most-wanted criminal in the world is on the loose again!"  
"Yes, but it's not like you haven't had practice defeating Hades…es. We were both conned. You just have to ensure that you're not so vulnerable on the next go round; assess the situation properly."  
I thought for a while.  
"You're right. I saved an essential box set of historical fiction from complete erasure, changed history for the better and persuaded an author to offer a satisfying resolution to her magnum opus. Were it not for the minor blip of setting an arch-criminal loose, I'd be a hero. I'll just have to track Hades down and fix the problem."  
"Well…"  
I wiped my eyes again, simmering rather than my earlier rolling boil.  
"Were you hoping to join the Hades hunt yourself? I could use a hand."  
"Can I offer a slight, statistically-based, correction to your analysis?"  
"Sure."  
"With appropriate, Bayesian priors instead of frequentist analysis, your win/lose statistics for this mission are less 'hero' and closer to 'quite acceptable.'"  



End file.
